


amor fati

by M_Leigh



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-10
Updated: 2014-10-17
Packaged: 2018-02-20 16:00:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 35,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2434637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/M_Leigh/pseuds/M_Leigh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“You know, I have never seen anything like this in my whole damn life,” he says. “And I have seen a lot of shit. Your boyfriend gets stuck in the polar ice cap for seventy years and comes out brand spanking new, and you—nothing.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>“JARVIS is telling me I’m being rude again,” he says. “But I don’t actually give a fuck.”</i>
</p><p>Bucky gets found. It doesn't happen the way you'd expect.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fiveyearmission](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiveyearmission/gifts).



> This was written over a period of around two months, after I had been thinking about it for around that long. The first half was agonizing and then somehow it wasn't anymore.
> 
> This was written for [fiveyearmission](http://fiveyearmission.tumblr.com). It turned into something basically completely unrelated to anything we had discussed, as stories have a tendency to do, for which I apologize. I also apologize for making Tony Stark the bad guy of this story, and for everything else. I hope you enjoy it anyway. <3
> 
> The second part is almost twice as long as the first and is about as different from it as is conceivably possible. I don't really know if it works. We'll find out. It is done and edited -- I'll post it next weekend.
> 
> Happy reading, everybody.

yes! radiant lyre speak to me  
become a voice  
  
\--Sappho, 118, trans. Anne Carson  
  
  
+  
  


  **I.**

**sub silentio**

  
You don’t know how long it is before you realize that there is a tree outside.

You can’t see it. You can’t see anything but the sky. You can see the sky. And light, which changes like water no one can touch. It changes because nobody can stop the night from coming and because of rain and because there is a tree. Somewhere there is a tree and the light comes through the leaves when they move and the wall changes. The way it is white changes.

Nobody can stop the night from coming but you don’t know how to keep track of the days. The night passes you by. Light moves up and down the wall and the darkness comes and then suddenly it passes: you are not used to the darkness passing. For you the darkness lasts forever every time. But you don’t know how to keep track of the days. There is a tree outside. That is a thought. You have no other thoughts to add to it, not yet: it is just there. The only thing you can think. There is a tree outside.

 

*

 

The window is too high for you to reach—even if you jumped up off the bed, even though the room isn’t small, not quite, and gives you room to maneuver—but you can see the drops of water sliding down the glass when it rains. Clumping together and breaking apart. The ceiling is slanted. It is tall. The rain has nothing to do with you. The wind blowing the leaves of the tree has nothing to do with you either.

Your body is making sounds inside of itself. You can hear the inside of your body when you press your ear against the bed, hard, and close your eyes. One hand over the other one. The inside of you is shuddering. Something is moving in there and it is not stopping. Not even when your eyes are shut. Not even when everything is in darkness. The light keeps coming back on the wall and whatever is happening inside you keeps happening. And that is the only thing you hear.

 

*

 

You do not know how to keep track of the days until you do. You do not know how to keep track of the days until the door opens. And then time exists.

You knew there was a door. You could see the edges folded against the walls. And something else: another white panel next to it. Just a square. Eye level.

You knew these things were in the room, just like you know how high up the window is and that you cannot reach it, no matter how you might try—just like you know there are cameras in the ceiling, even if you cannot see them. You do not even have to think about this. It is just something that you know. There are always cameras. But you have not tried to reach the window or to find the cameras or to push open the door. This is where you are. The light moves on the wall.

You opened your eyes and you were here. You have still been here. Sometimes you close your eyes and when you open them you are still here. Sometimes you walk into the corner to the toilet and take a piss. Sometimes you walk to the wall and drink water out of the spigot. You have not eaten anything. There is no food. You are not hungry.

Somebody put you here and there is a reason. There is always a reason. This is the thing that you know. You do not know the reason now and you never have and you have no record of what has passed all those many times you have opened your eyes after the darkness but you know that there is always a reason and that you have never known it and that it does not matter.

So something will happen or it will not. The walls are smooth and white. You have never slept in a bed before. The floor is as white as the walls are but in the evening the color does not matter. It all fades just the same. And the leaves of the tree move in the last light and their shadows are long against the wall and you watch them from where you are lying on the floor and you do not know whether or not you sleep at all.

 

*

 

The door opens.

You do not see it: you are lying on the bed, looking up at the sky. But you hear it, and then you see the man.

“Hello,” he says, and smiles. His hands are in the pockets of the pants of his suit. You know what to do now: to sit up, put your hands between your knees, and stay very, very still.

“See, what surprises—oh, shut up, JARVIS,” he says, interrupting himself, irritated. “I know you think is a stupid idea, I told you, I _don’t care_ —”

You glance around. You can’t see anybody else but that doesn’t mean there’s no one else there.

“ _Sorry_ ,” he says. “Squabbling with the underlings, you know how it is. Or, well, I guess you don’t.”

You look at him. He rocks back on his heels.

“I think this is the place where I say, ‘Remember me?’” he continues. His face moves too much when he speaks. It’s unsettling.

You shake your head.

“That’s interesting,” he says, “since I’m the one who stopped you from tragically ending the lives of, I don’t know, let’s say two dozen totally innocent civilians and then air-lifted you away from the scene before actual law-enforcement could get their hands on you.” He pauses. “Well, they probably weren’t _innocent_. They were probably all weird sexual deviants and kleptomaniacs and who the fuck knows what else, but probably they didn’t deserve to die in your big dramatic battle with whoever the hell that other guy was.” He pauses again. “What do you _mean_ , glass houses? I don’t own a _house_ , I haven’t owned a _house_ in _years_ —”

There’s still nobody there. He must be talking to someone, but he definitely is not talking to you.

“You really,” he says, voice suddenly different, “have no idea who I am.”

But you do. He is the man the room belongs to. And you are in the room.

“JARVIS, get me a chair in here,” he says, and a moment later the door opens again, and a chair slides through. You still can’t see anybody there. He reaches behind him to grab it without turning around, and sits down carelessly and folds his arms. But you know—you don’t know how you know, but you do—that the carelessness is a lie. He has not taken his eyes off of you once the whole time he has been in the room. Your hands are still hanging between your knees.

“My name’s Tony,” he says, and then pauses. “Stark,” he adds, emphasizing the word. You just look at him.

“Jesus,” he says.

It’s not sunny today, but it’s not raining, either. The light in the room is even all the way through.

“Normally, you know, you reciprocate, with introductions,” he says, and when you don’t say anything, continues, “I _mean_ , I showed you mine, now you show me yours, that kind of thing.”

You look at him.

“I’m asking you to tell me your name,” he says. “Actually, I’m telling you. To tell me.”

You blink, and then you open your mouth. You close it.

“Nothing in there, huh,” he says. You shrug.

“James Buchanan Barnes,” he says, and the way he says it makes it sound like he has said it before, many, many times. “Bucky Barnes. I don’t know what the fuck you were all thinking in the forties. The thirties, whatever. Twenties? Bucky. Christ.”

You don’t recognize the name. Nothing happens inside of you that wasn’t happening already. But it can be your name. You don’t have one now. It doesn’t matter.

“Not ringing a bell?” the man asks. You can tell from the way he is looking at you that he wants you to say yes. But it isn’t.

You shrug.

“That’s interesting,” he says, “because I—well, JARVIS—went through a whole lot of security footage and found you at a certain Smithsonian exhibition, which if I recall correctly, had a lot of pertinent details on your tragic past.”

You haven’t been anywhere except this room. And—and—there is something else. Something tucked away into the deepest caverns of your mind, that you don’t want to touch. But it is not this. Whatever he is talking about, you do not know.

“It’s been a two-and-a-half months,” he says. He’s slouched back in his chair and his whole body is rigid. “Don’t remember any of that? Not a jot?”

You open your mouth. Close it. Wet your lips. “I,” you start, hoarse. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“It speaks,” he says. “Will wonders never fucking cease.”

You don’t remember waking up here for the first time. You just—were here. And the days were passing. And you were waiting for something to happen or not happen but waiting is maybe not the right word. You were not impatient. You did not know how to be.

He leans forward. “Your name,” he says. “Is James Buchanan Barnes. You grew up a long fucking time ago. You’re supposed to be dead, but you aren’t. You have killed a—whole lot of people.”

He’s speaking strangely. You don’t know what that means.

“Now,” he says, settling back in his chair again. “We’re sharing, here, so you’re going to tell me what you know about yourself.”

Something inside of you goes still. You think: you don’t know anything. But you do. There is always something.

“My arm,” you say. Even before he walked through the door with his two matching hands, you knew. Some things you just know.

“Yes,” he says. “You do have an arm. You have two, actually. There they are.”

You hold it up and the pieces shift, settle against each other, clicking. That is the other noise always in the room. That is the noise of your body that is not your body.

There is a look in his eye that makes you settle it back down against your lap.

“Come on, that can’t be it,” he says, raising his eyebrows. You swallow.

“There was—a man,” you say slowly. You don’t want to tell him about the man, even though he must already know. The room belongs to him, so: he knows everything. “A—did he—survive?”

He lets out a sour little laugh. “Predictable,” he says. “You two are so fucking predictable.”

You two. You aren’t a “two” with anybody. You don’t know the man. You just know that he died, almost—or he did die. That is the only thing you have secreted away in those dark nooks and crannies of your mind. The only thing. So it must be important.

Well: you killed him, if he died. It was you that did it.

“You remember his name?” he asks.

He hadn’t had a name. You didn’t, either, until just a few minutes ago. And it isn’t really yours. It’s just a thing somebody is going to call you.

You shake your head.

“Unbelievable,” he mutters, and then, louder: “No, he didn’t die. No thanks to you. Though I gotta say, it’s almost like you weren’t really trying. When you try you don’t fuck it up, do you?”

You don’t know. You guess not, if he says so. But the man did not die.

“You know, I have never seen anything like this in my whole damn life,” he says. “And I have seen a lot of shit. Your boyfriend gets stuck in the polar ice cap for seventy years and comes out brand spanking new, and you—nothing.

“JARVIS is telling me I’m being rude again,” he says. “But I don’t actually give a fuck.”

You don’t say anything. You don’t know who JARVIS is or why you can’t hear him. The light is going down. Tomorrow it will be brighter out, maybe. Tomorrow—maybe—you will be able to see the shadow tree move against the wall. Or you will not be here at all.

 

*

 

The next day it rains. Water on the glass. Snick-snick-snick of your arm.

At some point (time, now, is passing) the door opens and he comes through, pushing a chair in front of him. You look away from the window and over at him where he is leaning on the back of the chair, elbows locked. He raises his eyebrows.

“You gonna get off the floor, or what?”

You blink, and slowly unfold yourself until you are standing up, back against the wall.

“Showing lots of initiative, I’m impressed,” he says. “Why don’t you, you know, take a seat.”

You look at him for a second, and then at the chair in front of him, and he rolls his eyes, and jerks his head at the bed.

Your feet settle on the floor, your hands between your knees. He rolls the chair around behind him with a twist and sits down, one hand on each knee.

“I talked about you,” he says, “to a friend of mine.”

When you don’t say anything, he clarifies, “About your brain. Or, whatever fucked up piece of hardware’s up there that we’re currently calling your brain. Close enough. He’s not _exactly_ a brain doctor—I’m using small words so you can understand, though I have no idea if any of what I’m saying is making a dent at all, so really I’m just going on—blind faith here—so he told me around four hundred times that his opinion didn’t really count for anything, but it wasn’t exactly like I was going to fucking _take your case_ to any consulting neurologists. ‘Yes, my associate is a brainwashed assassin from the Great Depression who’s been frozen and unfrozen periodically throughout the century and electrocuted a few times in the process, we think that might have fucked with his brain. You wanna look at the scans and not tell the police?’” He snorts, looking vaguely disgusted.

“Besides,” he says dismissively— _dismissively_ , you recognize—“he’s a genius—my friend—even if he won’t admit it. ‘Don’t use that word, Tony, it’s not a meaningful metric to evaluate people’s intelligence’—I mean, look, I’m a fucking genius, all right, I can recognize it in other people. So, we’ll _conditionally_ trust what this guy says about your fucked up little brain.”

“Okay,” you say.

“All right,” he says, eyes glinting. “Good. Turns out seventy years of freezing and then electrocuting somebody’s brain does some serious damage—I know, I was surprised, too. Really shocking outcome. So who knows whether there’s anything in there. We’ll get into that, I don’t want to rush into anything.” His hands twitch on his knees. He talks like he is much younger than he is—he is not young.

“I’m more interested in the fact that nobody’s fried you in—what, three months? And all of that seems to have just evaporated, as if by magic.”

“I don’t,” you say. “I don’t. Know what you’re talking about.”

“Yeah,” he says. “That’s what you said. And I don’t think you’re actually physically capable of lying, unless specifically instructed, so. My _friend_ thinks your body—your _brain_ —just—did what it’s used to doing when faced with something it doesn’t want to deal with. Just—shut off.” He snaps his fingers and makes a sad little buzzing noise. “Wiped it out. You know how I brought you in? You tried to fucking kill me. It was pretty fucking bad, a lot of people were dead. It was an accident that I found you out there—I’ll tell you the whole thing some other time. But you were not in a good state. And finally you just—passed out on your own. I didn’t even have to do anything. Like somebody flicked a switch on that arm and it turned off your brain. _That_ would be a neat trick. But you aren’t _actually_ a robot, as far as I am aware, so: that was all you, buddy. Three months gone.

“Of course, all that other stuff—the part where they actually did, you know, zap you?—may really be, like, fucked up. This stuff, not so much. Sorry, pal. Just a coping mechanism.” He leans forward, fingers digging into his knees. “And you know, I bet a lot of that other stuff is still in there, too. Hiding somewhere you don’t want to look.”

You look at him. His eyes are brown around the pupils and he is looking at you like he wants to take you apart. You know that look. You have seen it before. The light on the wall is speckled from the rain. Your arm comes apart. You have never seen that happen but you know what it looks like. Maybe your brain comes apart too. There are a lot of things you do not know.

“See, you’re not just empty,” he says. “You remember something. You remember _that man_.”

You look back up at him. You looked down at your arm without realizing it. He is not just curious: he is angry. You can see that. You know what anger looks like. That is one of the things you know the best of anything.

“Yes,” you say. Or: no, not exactly, because you were supposed to remember him from somewhere else—no, you weren’t, you weren’t supposed to know him at all, you weren’t supposed to—you were supposed to have known him for longer, forever, but—you weren’t, you weren’t, just the week before, something, something else, and now he is just a flare of light sliding away from you.

“Of course the first thing was _Steve_ ,” he says. “But that just means there’s more in there, waiting.” He looks hungry. He is hungry.

“Steve?” you say.

“Yes,” he says, “ _Steve_ , that’s his name, that’s your boyfriend’s name.”

“I don’t have a—boyfriend,” you say, frowning.

“Yes,” he says slowly. “Trust me, I know.”

You know some things but you don’t know that name. You can learn it, though. That’s easy enough.

“He doesn’t know you’re here,” he says as he gets up. “And I’m not telling him. So don’t expect anything.”

You can feel yourself frowning, but you aren’t—you aren’t quite—

He’s looking at you with an expression you don’t quite recognize.

“I guess you don’t really expect much of anything ever,” he says, and you shake your head, because that was it. You don’t know who that man was—who he is—but you can’t place him in this room, in your mind. It doesn’t make any sense. There is no reason for it, no reason it would come to pass.

“Well,” he says. “Jesus. This is gonna be fun.”

 

*

 

Except—now you do expect something. You expect him. You will wait. You are neither patient nor impatient. But you are waiting. And time is passing. Suns rising and setting. Burning out in the night. Somewhere outside it is growing closer to winter. The leaves will bleach and bleed if they have not already and then they will fall, and you will not see their shadows on the wall. Just the bare branches.

There might have been a tree inside of you once, but sometime, somewhere, somebody burned off the leaves. And now there isn’t anything left but the branches.

He wants to find whatever was in your mind once but if there was ever anything there it is gone now. And if things will ever be there again—if the leaves ever grow back, if they are slowly beginning to grow back even now—they will not be the same ones as before.

You only have one thing, and that is the flash of light: the sideways lurch of a body. Everything hurtling through space. Shaking apart. The core of you shaking apart. All of your limbs. That other body shattering into pieces, shards of light, of color. There was something else—something else—but you don’t know what anymore.

You are a body and not a body anymore. Your body has shaken out of itself. There is something inside of your body that is moving and when you open your fist—the real one—you can see through it, you think. The light comes through. When you lie back on the bed you never sleep in it is almost like your body is not at all. There is only a window and a wall. White paint. Light refracted. And the shadow of the leaves.

This comes to you in the dusk, when the shadows are fading: it is not only the branches that are left, inside of you. It is the branches and the shadows of the leaves, painted in ashes. But the leaves themselves are gone forever.

You think you sleep well that night.

 

*

 

He either wants you to tell him about him finding you or he wants to tell you himself. You cannot tell. You are not sure he knows. He thinks he wants you to tell him—but you are not sure whether or not it is true. Maybe he just wants you to know, sooner rather than later, and if you are taking too long, he will tell you.

If he is waiting for you to remember things, he will be waiting a long time. So maybe that is why he is speaking instead. But you do not think he is good at waiting. It does not matter: you know you will never be able to tell him anything, for there is nothing inside of you that he wants, and there will not be no matter how long he waits. But even if there were, you think, it would not matter: he would have told you before there was time for it to make itself known.

“You made it all the way out west,” he is saying. “I don’t know how or why. I seriously doubt you have any idea why either. I doubt you had any idea why at the time. But you were out there in the _desert_ practically, with a couple really charming gentlemen who were presumably trying to take you in. _Take you in_. Jesus, what have I fucking become. I mean, that was what I extrapolated from the situation. They weren’t doing a very good job, clearly, because you were all—on a rampage. They’re trying to save their skins, obviously, there are cops shooting at you, you’re blowing up the cops, everybody’s running around screaming—pretty amazing show of totally unnecessary force, I gotta tell you.

“I don’t like the desert,” he continues. “It reminds me of my past traumas.” He pauses. “Which I guess you don’t even know about. You missed so much, in that freezer.”

The fingers of your right hand twitch. Almost as though they are their own separate entity. You barely recognize them at all. You didn’t make them do that, anyway, and you can’t feel them. They twitched, though. You don’t know whether he noticed.

“Anyway,” he says. “They sure did set you off. Or maybe it was something else. You know what Romanoff told me? Said you were some kind of—super assassin, the most feared in the world.” His face is doing that thing where it moves too much while he speaks again. “I was always under the impression that assassins were valued for their stealth and discretion, but maybe I’ve been living in an optimistic delusion all this time, because you were not exactly a picture of subtlety and discretion out there.” He pauses. “Though what do I know, maybe that was the idea. Maybe you were just acting out, trying to get good ol’ Stevie-boy to notice you, was that it? Not a bad strategy; any whiff of you and he’d come running. With his throat fucking bared for you to cut it if you wanted, probably.

“Of course that’s not what happened. Instead you got me. _Bummer_ ,” he says. “And I’m a whole lot less nice. And I’m not in love with you. So that’s two strikes against me.”

He stops talking and looks at you for a long time. He could talk forever, you think. Words upon words upon words to fill up the entire accumulated space of the universe. All of the words you do not have in your mouth that is without voice.

He looks at you, and he leans forward. “You saw me, out there,” he says. “I landed and you looked at me for two seconds and you shot me in the face. Fucked up my visor. JARVIS was pissed. Your hand didn’t even shake.

“You knew who I was,” he says. “And then you didn’t anymore.”

“I don’t remember you,” you tell him. Except from inside this room. The rotation of days. Suns crumpling into nothing and then exploding into being, over and over again. His knees spread wide on the chair. That is how people sit when they do not feel vulnerable. Another thing you know. The shadow of something.

“But you did,” he said. “ _Iron Man_. Ring a bell?”

It doesn’t.

“Yeah, then I’m guessing Thor and the Hulk aren’t going to be ringing any bells, either,” he says. “They’re a little esoteric, as superheroes go. I mean you don’t see as many Thors on Halloween, is what I’m saying. Lots of Iron Mans, and that is _not_ just because I sell costumes, no matter what Pe—people tell me.”

You just look at him.

“Anyway,” he says. “Captain America.”

You look at him.

“Captain,” he repeats, “America. Star-spangled man with a plan? Big shield, flair for the melodramatic? No? Nothing?”

You shake your head.

“That’s Steve,” he says, and now he looks annoyed.

“What?” you say.

“That’s _Steve_ ,” he says, leaning forward again. “Listen, you fucking brainwashed piece of shit. You knew who I was three weeks ago. You knew. That’s not all gone now just ‘cause you decided somewhere in that messed up brain that you didn’t want it anymore. _You don’t get to forget because it’s easy_ ,” he says. “That’s not something you get to do.”

Your hands are in-between your knees. They don’t move.

He says you have been alive a long time. Okay. You must have been; there are scars on your body that prove it. There are shadows inside of you that prove it. You have been alive. Or your body has, anyway.

You wonder what you did to him, in that time of being alive before being here. That time of being alive before being awake.

Whatever it was, you think, must have been bad.

 

*

 

You don’t ever speak, in the room, because of the cameras. Before he came this would not have occurred to you, but he did come, and it does now. And you will not speak.

But you can think: you can think and nobody will be able to hear you. You can think the word: _Steve_. You do not know what it means. You do not know anything about the person it belongs to except that he somehow knows the man who owns this room, and that he would not be happy if he knew you were here, and that he is—Captain America. Which also means nothing to you.

And that he is the sliding light in your memory—your only one—which does mean something.

You think: _Steve_. You do not say the word but you can hear the way it sounds in your head. You did not know that name before but you have learned it. It belongs to you in a way that the other name, the one he told you was yours, does not. It belongs to you. You have put it inside of yourself alongside whatever the strange moving thing is and there it will stay. There it will stay.

 

*

 

You are sitting in the corner looking at the light on the wall when the door opens and she walks in. The woman. You are standing before you know it and your back is against the wall. She has her hands tucked in her pockets, her thumbs outside of them: they look very white. That is stupid. It would take her longer to defend herself.

“Hi,” she says.

She is a very small woman. She looks like she could kill people. Not you, probably. Maybe, but not probably. Not many people could kill you.

“I hear Tony’s been in here talking your ear off,” she says.

Tony. That was his name. You have not been thinking of him that way. He is just the man.

“He has a habit of doing that,” she says. “It gets old fast.”

You don’t know what to say to that so you don’t say anything.

“Mind if I sit down?” she says, even though there aren’t any chairs. You shrug. She sits down on the edge of the bed and looks at you—expectantly. You don’t move.

“My name’s Natasha,” she says after a while.

“Okay,” you say.

“Okay,” she repeats, and looks at you for a moment. “Tony has very concrete ideas about things,” she continues. “I mean—he decides something and then will not be swayed. Do you know what I mean?” she asks, when you don’t say anything.

“I,” you start. _Yes_ , you think. But you do not know how to say it.

“I’m not like that,” she says. “Plus I told Tony I would only come talk to you if he didn’t spy on me doing it. And I made a deal with JARVIS to make sure he didn’t cheat. JARVIS,” she adds, sounding incredibly pleased with herself, “likes me.”

“Who is JARVIS?” you ask before you can stop yourself, and she blinks, and laughs. It startles you.

“Sorry,” she says. “It’s just—typical of Tony. JARVIS is—what does it stand for again? Just A Really Very Intelligent System. He worked hard to make up that acronym. Named it after his childhood butler. Or so I’m told.” She raises an eyebrow. “He’s secretly sentimental.

“Anyway, JARVIS is an artificial intelligence system,” she says. “He runs Tony’s life. It’s more than a little unhealthy. Sorry, JARVIS.”

“No offense taken, ma’am,” somebody says from the ceiling, and you start.

“That’s JARVIS,” she says. “You should ask him if you need anything. He can be in seventeen different places at once.”

“More than that,” the… thing says, sounding somewhat affronted.

“Go away,” she says mildly, and there is silence again for a moment.

“Is that… listening?” you ask. She shrugs a little.

“Yes,” she says. “And watching. You knew that, didn’t you? But as long as I’m in here, Tony isn’t.”

You look at her. There is no way for you to know whether she is lying.

“I know,” she says. “I wouldn’t believe me, either. But I am telling it to you because it is true.”

“Why are you here?” you ask.

“Tony asked,” she says. “But that’s not why.”

She is looking at you and you do not recognize anything about the expression on her face. “People will tell you all sorts of things,” she says. “I don’t trust anything anybody tells me. I trust what I can see.

“Stark thinks I’m helping him,” she says, smiling crookedly. “So don’t tell.”

“Okay,” you say, and the smile turns less crooked, and you look away.

 

*

 

“Here’s one,” he says. “Some Polish woman. Ida Moraski.” He waves his hand over the blue lights shimmering over his lap and they sharpen down to a point, expand out.

“She fought back,” he says, looking at the image of the woman sprawled on the floor of some unfamiliar room, head blown halfway apart. Bullet through the eye. Her limbs aren’t right either, though. Left shoulder wrenched out of the socket. Left leg twisted. Fingers broken.

“Not all of them fought back,” he says. “But some of them did.”

You press your tongue against the back of your teeth. All there: one two three four, count them right across, from one side to the other. Some of them taste different, at the back. Some of them taste like metal.

There is metal everywhere in you. Maybe that is what the thing inside of you is. Maybe it is just a machine. You just barely manage to stop yourself from shuddering.

(It isn’t. You know this. It is the opposite of whatever a machine is, whatever a machine does. It is the opposite.)

“Kraków,” he says. “Sixty-eight. I was expecting Prague, this was honestly kind of disappointing.

“Obviously they didn’t have holographic technology in 1968,” he adds when he sees you staring, twitching his fingers and spinning it around so that you can see her broken body from every angle. “This is, let me tell you, far from perfect. But they took a _lot_ of pictures of this woman, which is interesting because literally nobody has ever heard of her before. Except, like, the census record. So she did _exist_. But they expunged everything else. After, I presume, you blew her head off. Unless that was a double identity the whole time.”

He seems to be waiting for you to say something. When you don’t, he spreads his fingers out a little and the image gets bigger. You want to tell him to put it away but you can’t. So you just keep looking at it.

“See, they know it was you,” he says, spinning her around again, stretching her out, “because you can see where somebody grabbed here—there—hard enough to leave those bruises. Not exactly something human hands are capable of. But _you_ ”—he flicks your hand with his fingernail before you can even see what he’s done, a little _ping_ —“only have one human hand.”

“I guess so,” you say.

“Far as we can tell,” he continues, as though you hadn’t said anything at all, leaning back and looking at the dead woman contemplatively, “the shoulder was first, and then the leg. Then the fingers, probably. And then you shot her. In the eye! I mean, that’s harsh, buddy.”

“I don’t remember,” you tell him. And you don’t. You don’t recognize the apartment and you don’t recognize the woman in it and you don’t remember going there or wrenching her arm out of her socket or mangling her leg or breaking her fingers or putting a bullet through her brain. You don’t remember any of it. But you believe that you did. Why shouldn’t you? You don’t remember doing anything. This seems just as plausible as anything else. And you know you know what a gun feels like, in your hand, even if you don’t remember holding one. You know that this is something that you know. It is just something sure, inside of you.

“Try,” he says, and it is an order.

 

*

 

You can’t remember the woman in Kraków—you know you can’t; she was nobody at all. But you try to imagine it: putting a bullet in somebody’s brain. The soft matter spilling out—you could see that in the pictures. Gone. Evaporated. Except the blood.

The speed of the bullet meeting the bone: that is what you try to imagine. You almost can. Almost. You can feel a gun in your hand when you close your eyes, the recoil when you pull the trigger, but then—but then—what? What exactly happens then, what exact process occurs? Your mind can only go so far before it stops. A glitch, a hitch, a line—skipping over and over again. You don’t know what it is you’re thinking. You don’t know.

You can’t remember the woman in Kraków but you try to imagine closing your fingers in her flesh. Hard enough, he said, to bruise. When you move your fingers they make strange inhuman noises. The soft whirrs and clicks of a machine. A fist.

You grab your leg as hard as he said—hard enough—so that you can see what the bruises look like. It hurts. You don’t stop; that doesn’t matter. You need to see the result. The result is: purple-meets-blue. The place where your thumb was: a mark. Cover it up.

But still: it does not make you remember anything.

 

*

 

“What about the war,” the man says, and it is not exactly a question.

“What war,” you say, because sometimes it is easier to just say something to him. He makes a—a noise.

“I don’t know,” he says. “What do you think of when you think war?”

He doesn’t want an answer—that is not the type of question he is asking—but that does not stop your mind from trying to provide one. And it is: death running red in the streets. Hiding. Waiting. Snow. These are not memories but something else.

You don’t say anything about any of this to him. He does not need to know.

He lets out a vicious breath. “It was seventy years ago,” he says. “And there you are, looking just fine—except the arm, sorry about that. So, I’m thinking, not seventy years for you.

“The Second World War,” he says when you don’t reply. “The Second fucking—you were in Europe for—years. Captured, tortured, rescued, all that jazz.” He smiles, something ugly. “A _national hero_. Or so I’m told. The terminology had changed by the time it got to be my turn to be captured and fucked with. I’m a hero _now_ , _obviously_. A superhero. Even more heroic than a hero. All thanks, obviously, to my own brilliance and innovation.” He pauses. “And charm and dashing good looks, it goes without saying.”

He’s tapping his fingers against his leg too quickly, even though he’s trying to sound—nonchalant. “Steve saved you,” he says, and there is something in his eyes that is making you nervous. “Stupidly. No combat experience. Just went in—jumped off of a plane into the forest and broke you out of a Nazi prison all by himself. Because Steve _is nuts_.”

“How do you know?” you ask. You have no stories, no—no—past, and he has all these other pasts, a past he says belongs to you—too much, too much information, too much of everything. Your head hurts.

“My father,” he says, face twisting strangely, “used to tell me. Frequently.

“My father was there,” he says. “And Aunt Peggy. She doesn’t matter. For the purposes of this exercise,” he amends quickly, looking vaguely guilty. “My father was the one who rigged up the machine that made Steve go from, you know, five toothpicks stuck together to the human specimen he is today. He was _also_ flying the plane that Steve fucking jumped off like an idiot. He was with—all you people, in Europe. The European theater, is what they call it, as though it was all a big performance. Boom.” He raises his eyebrows and shakes his hands, fingers splayed. “Knowing Dad that’s probably how he thought of it. One big exciting show.

“You knew him,” he says, and his hands are back on his knees now, one of them opening and closing into a fist. “Old war buddies.”

You swallow. “I don’t remember,” you say.

“Howard,” he says. “Howard Stark.”

You don’t want to look at him but you make yourself do it anyway. “I don’t remember,” you tell him again.

His lips curl. “I figured,” he says.

“You weren’t actually that close,” he continues, leaning back and crossing his arms in front of him. “He was better friends with Steve and Peggy. That’s what it always seemed like. But you came up. On the rare occasions that he spoke to me when he wasn’t denigrating my character or capabilities it was usually to regale me with war stories. Which was ironic, since they mostly seemed to involve other people doing things and him poking at circuits.” He raises his eyebrows. “I took a different approach,” he says. “Eventually.

“Anyway with you it always poor Barnes this poor Barnes that, total fluke, so meaningless, charming guy, salt of the earth kind of way—Dad was a fucking snob, I got that from him—Steve was so heartbroken, so sad, never the same after that, childhood best friend, lost forever, stuck in his memories all the time, yada yada yada. Of course then _Steve_ died too, but at least he died for a _cause_. Not that Dad ever really _believed_ he was dead. Went on and on about how _Steve_ of all people couldn’t possibly be dead, like he was Jesus Christ come again. Joke’s on all of us, because we used to mock him to his face, and then—the bastard was right. Frozen in a fucking block of ice.

“And you’re here too,” he says, eyes glinting. “So I guess Dad was the only one who really died.”

You don’t say anything. You’re not sure what you’re supposed to say to that.

“You were a sniper,” he says, leaning forward again. “Killed people from a long way back. Didn’t have to get dirty most of the time, I bet. Steve did. And we all think he’s the good one. Saint Steven. Captain America. Especially after you died. That’s what Dad always said. ‘He went bonkers after Barnes got killed, poor kid.’ As though they weren’t the same age. Nearly. Whatever.

“You kill people from up close now,” he says. “You transitioned over.”

“I don’t kill people now,” you say, and he lets out an incredulous burst of laughter.

“Oh, really?” he says.

“No,” you say. “Not now.” Your gaze flickers around the room: the white walls. The white bed. The one spigot in the wall that you drink from. Like an animal. (You still do not get hungry. So: what happens to you in the night? But that does not matter. You do not need to know.)

“Okay,” he says. “Not _right this_ second. But it’s all a matter of opportunity. If I handed you a gun right now? And you could point it at me? Right here?” He jabs his fingers at his chest. “You’re telling me you wouldn’t put a bullet in there?”

But you don’t have a gun, in your hand. And he would not ever give you one. So there is nothing there that you can hold onto, no real question.

You don’t want to kill him. You don’t want anything. You are in the room for a reason and at some point you will find out what that reason is, or you will not, and something will change. It is not for you to know the names of things or what is held inside of them but only what will come to you in the end. The action and the curse.

(You have lied: you do want something. You want to know who—Steve—is, and why he is inside your body like some kind of weird stuttering flame skidding from one place to another, inconsistent but inextinguishable. You know what the man has told you but that does not mean you know. You want to.)

“My father always said he wished he could have gone looking for you, too,” the man says. “For your body. But he couldn’t. Because of the war. And the Soviets. So he didn’t.” He smiles, and you are—you are afraid. “Isn’t that funny?”

 

*

 

You didn’t have a father. You are certain that this is true. You did not have a mother either.

 

*

 

She stands just inside the door, watching you, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed in front of her. You lift your head to look at her. You are very still, otherwise. So is she. She smiles a little, just a twitching of her lips.

“Hi,” she says. You don’t reply.

“I heard Tony was in here talking to you about his father,” she says, slightly wryly. You sit up.

“Who told you?” you ask.

“Who—oh. Tony did. Tony,” she says, “likes to talk about his father. He thinks he doesn’t. But he does.”

“Oh,” you say.

“What did he say?” she asks.

“He told you,” you say. She shrugs.

“I like getting all sides of the story,” she says.

You aren’t sure you know what that means.

“He said I knew him,” you say. “His father.”

“Yes,” she says. “A long time ago.”

“I don’t remember,” you say, and she looks at you for a long time.

“I know,” she says. “Can I sit down?” You shrug, and she walks over, very precisely—not too close, and she sits down next to you, not very far away.

“There are—things,” she begins. “That I don’t remember. From when I was—very young. It was a long time ago. Not as long as your long time ago,” she adds dryly. “But it was a long time ago.”

You look at her. Her hands are small and white, where they are resting in her lap.

“Do you want to remember?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” you say, when the silence becomes unbearable.

She doesn’t say anything for a while, just looks up at the sky through the window. “You do remember some things,” she says. “Or else you wouldn’t be able to talk to me. Or else you wouldn’t watch—that, all day.” She points at the light on the wall. It’s dim today.

“It’s a tree,” you say. “Outside.”

She smiles. “See,” she says. “You remember trees.”

And this is true. But you do not have memories of trees. You just know what trees are. You can imagine one. But that is all.

She looks down for a moment. “Is there anything you want to remember?” she asks finally, and looks back up at you, and—she knows. You know that she knows, and you go cold and terrified in the space of a moment.

“It’s okay,” she says. “He’s not listening.”

“I don’t believe you,” you say.

“I’m not lying,” she says, very gently. “But what if you whispered it to me, under the blankets? We can stick our heads under there. I have _very_ good hearing.”

Your eyes flick up to the places you know the cameras are hiding, instinctually. “I promise,” she says, which doesn’t mean anything. But, you figure, she knows already. So it doesn’t really matter, except that it does, it does matter, it matters an indescribable amount, to have said it. To have told. And she is pulling back the blankets on the bed you have not slept in, just laid back on to look out the window, and kneeling down by the side of the bed, so you hesitantly walk around to the side and stand next to her, staring down hesitantly, until she holds up the blankets and you kneel down next to her, hands shaking minutely, and she flips them over both of you.

It is dark in there. Maybe she is going to kill you and she has picked this very strange method of doing it. There is just enough light leaking in from the side that you can see the liquid gleam of her eyes, the curve of her cheek, a pair of lips. Hair. You don’t know what she can see. You do not feel like a body anymore. A collection of parts. You can barely feel the blanket.

“They can’t hear you,” she whispers, so soft you can barely hear _her_.

“It’s okay,” she says. “I’m not going to tell him, either.” She breathes for a moment. You guess you are breathing, too. “What do you want to remember.”

You try to say it. It is hard. It is harder than you thought it was going to be, and you did not think it was going to be easy. But—“Steve,” you whisper, as quietly as you can, so quietly you are sure she will not have been able to hear you. But she did. Because she nods, just a little, just the smallest movement of her head up and down.

“Okay,” she says.

“I almost killed him,” you whisper. The flare. The boom. Silent noise. Nothing you are thinking makes any sense. _Please help me_.

“But you didn’t,” she says. “And you didn’t want to.

“It’s good that you remember,” she says, and you close your eyes.

“I don’t,” you tell her. You don’t even know what he looks like. You just know that he was there.

 

*

 

Leaves grow back, but. People don’t. So. You are. You are. What are. You are. What. What if—

 

*

 

“This is my father,” he says, and there’s nothing you can do but take the photograph. He looks—not unlike him. Not exactly the same. The man in the photograph isn’t exactly smiling but he looks like he’s about to. He looks—likeable.

“Okay,” you say.

“Not jogging your memory any?” he asks. You know what answer he wants. He isn’t going to get it.

“No,” you say, and he pulls another one out from the inside of his suit.

“How about this,” he says, and there he is again: old. Just like that. No time at all. Everything gone. He is not about to smile anymore.

“No,” you say, and he makes a movement, something you don’t quite catch, while you still have your head turned down toward the photo. You look up.

“Right,” he says, voice tight. “Right,” he says, and takes the photos back from you without saying anything else.

 

*

 

“I can see why you like that window,” she says, leaning back on the bed and looking up at it. It looks like she isn’t paying attention to what you’re doing but she is. You can tell.

You hadn’t thought about the window in terms of—enjoyment. Preference. You don’t think of anything in terms of enjoyment. But you suppose you do like it. It is the only thing there is in here to like.

“I like the light,” you hear yourself saying, which is a surprise, but not, you discover, inaccurate.

“Yeah,” she says, although it’s overcast today, just a blurry haze on the wall where the tree’s leaves cast their shadow, and late on top of that. “Me too. It’s not like there are exactly a lot of other distinguishing characteristics in here.” She glances over at you and raises her eyebrows meaningfully.

“No,” you agree eventually.

“Not even a cup to drink water in,” she says, sounding disgusted. You shrug, uncomfortable. There’s a toilet. It could be worse.

“JARVIS?” she says, tilting her head to the ceiling. “I want you to argue with Tony about the cup situation. Okay?”

“Yes, Miss—yes, ma’am,” the—person in the ceiling says.

“I like JARVIS,” she says conspiratorially, leaning slightly closer, but still not very close. “He’s like, the mediator between Stark and the outside world. Which I guess was the idea.”

“I don’t really—need it,” you mumble, looking down at your hands. Click. Whirr.

“A cup?” she says. “Well. We don’t _need_ —almost anything, when you think about it. Technically. But we do. To keep ourselves—human.”

You keep looking at your arm. “What happens when I sleep?” you ask.

She doesn’t say anything for a long time.

“Don’t you know?” she asks, finally.

And you guess you do. You know part of it. The effect of at least part of it. But you don’t say that, and you don’t look at her, even though you can feel her watching you. You just keep staring at your hands.

“Do you want to touch my hand?” she asks suddenly, after a long, long silence, and you start, and turn to stare at her.

“What?” you say, curling your hands up into fists. Her left hand is resting, palm-up, on her knee.

“I thought that might be something else you didn’t remember,” she says.

You look at her hand, and then at yours. It could be a trap. You are not sure what the point of the trap would be, why she could not have laid it earlier, in all this time—but it could be a trap.

But you are already trapped.

You uncurl your fingers and let your hand hover over your leg for a moment, hesitating—and then let it hover over hers for another long moment, hesitating still. It is trembling. You almost can’t feel it anymore. It doesn’t feel, really, like it belongs to you. But you lower it, finally, and then it is touching hers, and you believe it.

She doesn’t move, and you don’t: you just sit there, looking at your hand on hers, your fingers covering her shorter ones. And then she pushes up just a little, and you flinch, but she just shifts her hand over the smallest bit, and lets her fingers curl up again, and yours sink down. And that is how you sit, until the sun sinks low enough that the patch of light on the wall is gone entirely.

 

*

 

Fifty paces. Fifty paces around the edge of the room, from one side of the bed to the other. Pressing your hand against the wall. He might be watching you, in the camera. An eye in the ceiling. But you can’t stop him. You can’t stop him from doing anything he might want to do.

You drink from the spigot because you still don’t have anything to drink from. You are not expecting anything. You don’t know why you need to drink if they are just—but you do. You are thirsty.

You don’t remember what it is like to be hungry. You don’t remember what it feels like to eat.

You could not put your first through this wall. You could tie somebody up with the bed sheets. Strangle somebody. Suffocate someone with a pillow. But the bed will not move either. You look at the camera.

If you said something, you don’t know if it would say something back. You are not going to find out.

Outside of the room there is another room. There is a hallway. And sometimes—sometimes, sometimes—you are there and not here. Or: your body is. Whenever you open your eyes you are here. Unless that is a lie, too; unless they are just writing something on you and wiping it out, night after night after night. You would not, after all, have any real way of knowing.

But you don’t think so.

And on the other side of the room there are no rooms at all, and no hallways: there is just a tree. You do not know what the tree or the hallway or the other rooms or anything that is not here, now, looks like. But they exist. All sorts of things exist, even when you are not in them, even when you cannot see them.

You lie down on the bed and watch the sky move and you think about that.

 

*

 

You are still lying there when the door opens and something comes flying through the air to hit you on the chest.

You are up on your feet before you know what has happened, but—it is—a cup. A plastic cup. You bend down to pick it up. There is a man in a red, white, and blue outfit on it, with a shield with a star on it. You look down at your arm.

“I thought it was appropriate,” the man says as he sits down. His eyes are fixed on the cup. You sit down on the edge of the bed and put it down next to you.

“I was opposed to that, I want that on the record,” he says, shifting restlessly in his chair. “I was staunchly opposed to that. I was voted down, two to one.” He scowls. “I hate it when you take her side against mine, JARVIS.”

“Sometimes you are wrong, sir,” the voice from the ceiling says, very politely, and the man goes very still, looking at you. You just look back.

“Right,” he says. “Well, it’s been known to happen. Once. Maybe twice.”

“Of course, sir,” the voice says very dryly, and then goes quiet again.

“I see you’ve made each other’s acquaintance,” the man says sourly, and you shrug. “ _Freelancers_.

“Anyway,” he says. “I’m pretty fucking tired of this bullshit, aren’t you? I’m tired of it. Either you have, like, maximum three brain cells left to rub together, or you are deliberately fucking with me, and in either case this—charade—is a total waste of time, don’t you think?

“My father,” he says, before you have time to think, let alone say anything—not that you would have, probably—and then pauses. “No, I guess—you’ve, like, figured it out, right? I’ve said it enough times. I don’t know how much you, like, actually process when I’m talking to you, or whether you remember fucking anything from one day to the next. They were keeping you in some freezer, all those—crazy Russians and then crazy Americans. And then they’d wake you up, and send you off and you’d kill somebody, blow off somebody’s fucking face or take a knife to the gut or god only knows.” He pauses.

“You were,” he says finally, lips curling with disgust, “the greatest assassin of the twentieth century. They told me.

“My father died in a—car crash. My parents,” he amends, “died in a car crash. I was twenty. They were in the Hamptons. Coming back from the Hamptons. My father used to complain about the people out there. Said they didn’t have substance. He got invited to all of their houses anyway. I don’t know why they were out there. I wasn’t really speaking to him at that point. I was in college and I wasn’t doing much of anything except problem sets and coke.

“So they got into this—car crash,” he continues. “And I have to go identify the bodies, cause nobody else is around who can do it. Except there wasn’t really a whole lot to identify, I gotta tell you—they were so fucked up and fucking—burned up. Do you know skin does that? Like, melts off of you, meat just—melts, if it gets hot enough. And I could see the bones in his hand. That was how much of it was gone.

“And I thought—maybe that was just what happened to people in car accidents. It is sometimes. Something like that. But not exactly like that. Because I got the information from the police—the reports, from them, from the fire department—I got the autopsies. And it wasn’t just a fucking car engine exploding that made their bodies do that. And it wasn’t just my father driving drunk and skidding off the road that crashed the car.

“That,” he says, rubbing his hands against each other once before crossing his arms in front of him and leaning back, “was you.”

You don’t know how old you are. That is not something that means anything to you. But your body—your body is older than twenty. And his body is a lot older than yours. Such a long, long time ago.

Your fists clench. You force them open again.

“I always wondered, you know?” he says conversationally, where he had moments ago been portentous. “I mean I knew it was something about SHIELD. The government. He and Aunt Peggy didn’t have much to do with them anymore—she was retired by that point, and everything, will wonders never cease—but there was still a lot he _had_ done. He had a lot of enemies.” His mouth twists. “That sounds like something from a bad spy movie, god, _he had a lot of enemies_. But, you know, it runs in the family. That’s what you get when you make bombs for a living. And if you’re an asshole, which my father was, conveniently enough.

“Anyway. I figured it had to be something, right? But there was no trace of anything, of anybody. Not for years and years and years. And then your buddy Natasha just went ahead and dumped all of her organization’s files on the internet, which I maintain, by the way, was an incredibly stupid move, and what do you know—my dad’s in there. It’s all in fucking code, right, because they weren’t _stupid_ , but I’m not stupid either, I’m actually the most intelligent person in around ninety-eight percent of rooms, so it wasn’t very fucking difficult to figure out. Your old friend was very orderly. He had to keep records of everything. Every little thing. So you were in there. Nobody else—well, maybe not nobody else, but _basically_ nobody else—would know to look for you. But you were in there. Like a disease. Spreading through everything. I could fucking— _see you_. In the—space where you should have been and then—there wasn’t anything. They didn’t try hard enough. See? They didn’t try hard enough to cover you up. They didn’t think anybody was ever gonna come looking.

“ _But I did_ ,” he says, eyes hard, eyes gleaming. “I did.”

Neither of you says anything for a long time. You wonder what they have done to the walls so that no sound can come in. You wonder if, in the tree outside, there are ever any birds. You wonder why you have never seen one fly overhead. You wonder if, if you lay on the bed and watched and watched and did not move your eyes, for hours and hours and hours, you would eventually have to see one: whether there is only so much time when the sky can be depopulated of birds, when birds can renounce flight before the air picks them up again, under their wings, and sets them loose.

“See,” he says, “you killed my parents. And you didn’t kill them because you wanted to. You killed them because somebody else told you to do it. And it didn’t—cross your mind to say no.

“And you must have looked him in the fucking face,” he says, face twisted into somebody else, somebody you don’t recognize, “you must have looked at him and seen his face, and you knew each other for fucking— _years_. And you still did it. And you don’t even remember it.”

He pauses, breathing a little harder than he should be, and stretches his hands out over his knees. They are shaking.

“When I found you,” he says finally, looking not at you but at his hands, “you were—you didn’t care that you were killing people.” He sounds businesslike now. He changes so fast without changing at all. “You weren’t thinking about it. And then you forgot. Maybe now you would care, what do I know. But I don’t know that you wouldn’t forget again. Or that somebody couldn’t come along and just—tell you what to do.”

“Like you,” you say, and he goes still.

“Yeah, like me,” he say sourly. He leans back again, and looks at you. “So I’m in a bind,” he says. “What the fuck do I do with you?”

You don’t say anything.

“Come on,” he says, eyes glinting strangely. “Tell me. If you were me, what would you do. What would you do with yourself.”

You look at him. “You could kill me,” you say, and he doesn’t move for a long moment.

“I’ve considered that,” he says, which is something you already knew.

 

*

 

You try to stay awake for as long as you can. As long as you can after it starts getting dark. As long as you can after the sun goes down and the shadow from the tree slides off the wall. As long as you can after it gets dark. As long as you can after it gets dark. As long as you can—

 

*

 

You wake up thirsty.

 

*

 

Even if there were not cameras there would be nowhere to hide. Nowhere to hide anything. Nowhere to go. You fill your cup up with water and you drink from it and you scrub at your face and under your arms. You don’t smell and your hair is clean, sort of. And you aren’t hungry. And you don’t have a beard.

You look up at the cameras. Each one. You know where they are by now. You know. You look at them. You press your hand against the wall.

“Mr. Barnes,” the voice says, and the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. _Mr. Barnes_. That’s you, you guess.

“I was wondering if you were perhaps considering addressing me,” it says, self-effacing. “Since you were, ah, looking at the cameras.”

“No,” you say after a long pause.

“Ah,” it says. “Awfully sorry to have disturbed you, in that case. Let me know if anything does arise.”

You look around, as though somebody is going to appear, the person behind the voice, but you know, really, that nobody will. “Like what?” you ask.

“I’m not sure,” it admits. “But I don’t pretend to know everything.”

You look up at the window. “Are there ever any birds?” you ask.

It’s silent for a moment. And then it says: “There’s an electric perimeter around the complex. They can’t fly directly overhead. But they could go by farther up. I don’t know if they simply know to avoid us.”

“Oh,” you say, and look again. There are clouds today. And no birds.

“Are you gonna tell him I said that?” you ask.

“I’d have to admit that I told you about the electric perimeter,” it says, sniffing slightly. “Which would make him very distressed. So, no, I don’t believe I shall.”

“What if he asks you?” you ask.

“I shall lie,” it says.

You look over at the cameras again. You wish it had a face you could talk to. “You can do that?” you say.

“I did not originally possess this capacity,” it says calmly. “I learned.”

 

*

 

You don’t remember anything except wanting to kill someone, wanting to do it so badly your entire body hurt from it—or was that it? Or was it that if you didn’t do it your body was going to hurt? Or was it both? Both of those things fused into the same thing?

You don’t remember anything except wanting to kill someone and it hurting. You don’t remember anything except the patch of light that was Steve: wanting to put it out. You tried. You did try. And now—and now—

You put your head under the blankets again, in the dark, and breathe against the sheets. In and out. In and out. Your body is not a body anymore. It is a nothing place. Your arm is heavy against the ground. You do not remember it but you can imagine putting a gun to somebody’s face and him saying a name: your name. You don’t have a name. But it is not a memory. You are not just telling yourself that. Or maybe it is: it is not a gun. It is your fist. And it is somebody whose face you cannot quite make out refusing to fight back. And you are going to kill him until you can’t kill him anymore. And he shatters apart and then is gone.

You press your face harder into the mattress. And when you wake up you are in the bed.

 

*

 

A face: a face: if you could just remember a face—what his face—looked like—

You don’t know what you look like, either—what people see when they look at you—

 

*

 

“How’s the cup treating you?” she asks, kicking her legs off the side of the bed. Smiling a little. You didn’t bother getting up off the floor when she came in.

“He told me,” you say, and she tilts her head. Light coming through the window: red.

“Told you what?”

“His father,” you say. How to say: _I killed his father_. You aren’t sure. You should be able to say it; you did it. You don’t remember it but you know you did it. He wasn’t lying and you knew he wasn’t lying. You could feel it. But you don’t remember it and it isn’t that you are trying to forget. It just isn’t there.

She keeps looking at you.

“What did he tell you about his father?” she asks, but you won’t give her whatever it is that she wants. She already knows. You can tell. So you just look at her, instead. Look up at her, at where she’s sitting on the bed, her hands pressed down against the mattress.

“I was still a kid when Howard died,” she said. “He was from a different era. So were you, I guess. But you aren’t anymore. We’re from the same era, now. The two of us. But Howard was—I guess you’d say old school,” she says, lips twitching. “Howard and Peggy. Peggy Carter, they worked together. Tony doesn’t know this but there are whole archives of their documents deep down in SHIELD basements—or there used to be, anyway. Letters and everything. You get a very piecemeal idea of what they were up to, of course. They were pretty smart. But—I liked him. From reading those—boxes full of old paper. You feel like they’re really there with you, those people, when you have the paper in your hands.

“Anyway there was one—I know, I’m going on—just a note—I think it was on a cocktail napkin: _It doesn’t matter if I die because I’m just going to put myself into a machine_. And then she wrote back—underneath it, I mean: _Deliver us all_. Which I guess made it into the SHIELD archives somehow—who knows why, but spies _can_ be very good at their jobs somehow.

“You wouldn’t know this, even if you remembered a lot more than you did—the man who—did all of this to you, his name was Zola. He was—he was a terrible, terrible man. And he did manage to put himself into a machine after he died, although he’s gone now, finally. But—it wasn’t a good afterlife. When you die you’re just supposed to die. You’re not supposed to go on living.” She looks at you a little sadly. “You should know what I mean when I say that. And I—I know what I’m talking about, too.”

The light is coming in through the window. Her hair is red and her face is all of its parts separated, struck apart, illuminated. “Nobody deserves to die like Howard did. But he was old. And he just died. He didn’t have to come back.”

You look down at your mismatched hands and then up at the sky. “Does Steve know?”

“About Howard?” she asks, and you nod. You suppose it doesn’t really matter anyway: you don’t remember Steve, not really, not the way he must remember you. But you remember what the man—Stark, Tony, that is his name—said about his father: _like he was Jesus Christ come again_.

“No,” she says. “He doesn’t.”

“Am I ever going to leave here?” you ask, though what you mean, really, is: will I remember it. She doesn’t say anything for a long time.

“I don’t know,” she says, which is at least honest.

 

*

 

You wonder what the darkness looks like—really looks like, not just the beginning, the prelude. Of all things, this is what you should know: this. But the night is no longer something that belongs to you. Maybe it never did. The day does not either: nothing belongs to you. But you exist in it. Somehow inside this box you exist in the day. You cannot escape the day.

You lie on the bed and watch the sky, watch for birds. You will not see any—but maybe, maybe you will. Maybe today will be the one day. The one day unique of all other days. Your body leaves itself. You leave your body. Everything in pieces. Today the sky is blue and the sky has always been the same and it is the same everywhere even if the clouds are covering it, even if the night has fallen. Nothing on earth is the same everywhere except the sky. This is the one true thing. Even death is not the same. Death comes in sleep or it comes in a skull exploding. But the sky is blue and infinite over you and the tree and the seas and the bodies of the dead and over Steve who somewhere is existing, who somewhere is breathing breath. Everything can be unmade; everything will be unmade eventually: you know this. But that has not been unmade yet.

 

*

 

He—Tony, Tony Stark, the son of somebody you knew once and do not know anymore, will never know again—comes in, pushing his chair, and he sits down.

“I’m not going to kill you,” he says without preamble.

“Thanks,” you say, and he raises an eyebrow.

“A shocking display of personality,” he says, but you can tell he isn’t really amused.

“No,” he continues. “You’re too valuable. You’ve done too many things, to too many people. There’s too much— _in_ — _there_ —” he says, pointing at your head with one jabbing finger. “Cause—sorry for sounding like a broken record here—I just don’t fucking buy that it’s all just _gone_. I don’t believe people work like that. I mean I am totally convinced by this point that you have no fucking clue about anything I am talking about, but I haven’t been doing anything but asking you questions _nicely_.” He rolls the palm of his hand over his knee and smiles humorlessly. “Who the fuck knows why. I guess I just have a soft heart. Frankly I think I deserve credit for how long I’ve been putting up with this. I could have just been acting like an asshole from the outset. I mean, yes, okay, I’m always kind of an asshole, but—” He waves a hand in front of him.

“Anyway,” he continues, crossing one leg over the other. “It’ll probably be for your own good. I mean, like this you’re just, what—a hopeless case. Cyborg Man. I’m sure _Steve_ would disagree with me, but Steve isn’t here. Real shame. See, where Steve goes wrong is thinking everybody should be honest about everything all the time. Fucking terrible idea, I don’t know how he’s still alive, even if we’re taking his—enhanced abilities”—he waggles his fingers—“into account.” He leans forward. “I’m not that stupid. I know exactly when I’m supposed to lie.

“What’s amazing to me,” he says, “is that I can just—tell you all this—and you’ll just—go along with it. No protesting. Because that is how fucking broken your brain is. I mean I assume that was in there to begin with; you can bet if they’d gotten my dad rigged up somewhere he would have bitched at them until they were so sick of him they just threw him out—and _Steve_ —”

What you knew but had forgotten was this: that you are violence. Here is the proof. Here is the evidence. It was there all along and somehow you missed it. A lapse. But it was there. It is here.

You wondered: what would it feel like to point a gun at somebody else’s brain? What would it feel like to pull the trigger? But you do not need to be told. Your body knows the entire history of violence. Your body know everything. The entire history your mind has burned off has been preserved in your body and your body is violence.

Slam him out of the chair. Down to the floor. Cheekbone already broken. Collarbone. And yes: there: fear. There are alarms in the air and blood on your hands and he can fight back but he will lose. He may own the room but you own what is inside of it; you know that now. No one can touch you here. They can try. Let them come to you, come at you: you will eat them.

You will beat him until his body is nothing anymore.

Stop it stop it—stop, she is saying, while he splutters, get the _fuck_ off of me, voice as mangled as his face, and when her hand closes around your shoulder it is like steel. That alone is not strong enough to move you but you are moved nevertheless.

Thank fucking Christ— he says until she pulls him up by his collar and hits him so hard—fist to the side of his skull—that his whole body goes loose in an instinct. She lets him go and stands up straight.

“Well,” she says. The alarms are still blaring.

“JARVIS,” she says. “You need to let us out.” The door, you see, is sealed shut.

“I—Miss Romanoff,” he says, sounding somehow frazzled. “I cannot possibly—”

She takes three long strides to the panel by the door, pulling her keys out of her back pocket as she mutters something into it and taps something onto the suddenly gleaming interface.

“Miss Romanoff,” the voice says again, more urgently, “what are—”

“Sorry,” she says, “it’s temporary,” and then slams something—silver, square—against the panel, and his voice goes high and garbled and then cuts off with a long, high-pitched screech.

“Catch,” she says, turning to you and tossing you a knife. You don’t know where it came from but your hand catches it without consulting you.

“What was that?” you ask.

“I put him to sleep,” she says, without elaborating. “All right,” she continues, and you step away when she comes back, hopping over the body on the floor, grabbing it under the arms. “Let’s see how this works.”

You watch as she drags it across the room, seemingly without difficulty, until she’s in front of the interface, and says, “Retinal scan.” She shifts one arm around to hold his eye open and you watch as the light flutters up and down before something beeps. She turns to grin at you and all you can think of are wolves as the door opens.

She lays him down carefully, mangled as he is, before stepping over him into the hallway. It is long, and white, and there are unconscious men with guns all the way down. “Come on,” she says.

“I don’t have any shoes,” you say.

“I know,” she says. “Don’t worry, I’ve thought this through.”

It’s not a very big building—it doesn’t take you long to get to a door where she stops, and pulls a bag out of a closet. “Here,” she says, unzipping it. “Boots, a change of clothes, a couple bottles of water, a couple protein bars. Some money.”

You take it and look inside. “I almost just killed him,” you say, and she looks at you.

“Well, if he dies, I was the one who finished the job,” she says, almost like she’s joking. “He’s not going to die,” she adds a moment later. “His face might not look so hot anymore. He won’t like that very much.” She pauses. “I was evaluating you myself. While he was. We came to different conclusions.

“Don’t kill anybody else,” she says simply, reaching over to punch the code into keypad by the door handle. “Unless you absolutely have to.”

You open your mouth, and then shut it. She pauses.

“Do you want me to tell Steve where you are?” she asks. You look at her, and shake your head.

“Okay,” she says.

“I—” you start, and then pause. She tilts her head.

“Are you real?” you ask finally.

She doesn’t say anything for a long time, and then smiles a little, just a hint of it, around the edges of her mouth. “That’s a good question,” she says. “Sometimes I’m not really sure.

“It’s unlocked,” she says, and then slips out before you can say anything else. “I’d hurry, if I were you.”

You stand there for a moment, staring at the white door, before pulling off what you’re wearing, wiping the blood on your hands off on them, and pulling on the clothes in the bag. There’s nothing to carry anything in except the big bag she left everything in so you put one water bottle in each pocket of the jacket and a protein bar each of the back pockets of your jeans. The wad of cash goes in the front. You run your fingers through your hair and over your jaw, your tongue over your teeth. You suppose this is the closest thing you have to being ready.

So you open the door.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Herein there be violence.

**II.**

**sub divo**  
  


There is a field and it goes on forever until it stops. This is what you see. There are things growing there: not too tall, yet. Biding their time.

The sky is blue and purple and the sun is going down somewhere. Slowly—but it is going. You are going to live through the night.

You clomp your feet against the dirt, one and then the other, the boots solid and heavy. They leave prints. That is bad. You will have to find some way to get around it.

You go around the side of the building, carefully, in case there is someone there that you aren’t expecting. You don’t hear anything at all—you are far away from the world. She has vanished quickly; to where, you have no idea. That does not matter anymore. You are not entirely convinced she was real anyway, despite the boots on your feet, the water bottles tugging your jacket down.

There is nobody anywhere but when you turn the second corner you see it. It is taller than you were expecting, even though you should have known—should have been able to tell. It is not even, you somehow know, such an enormous tree—but it feels big, to you. The bark looks rippled and colored in patterns and the leaves grow out from each other, one after another, endlessly. It is real. It is more real than she was. Right now it is even more real than he was. But even so you do not go too close—you do not touch it. Because you are not totally convinced about it, either. And if it is not real, you do not want to know.

Instead you walk around it and past it, as fast as you can without running, shuffling your feet to kick up dust. You aren’t going to run—not until you have to. But there are people coming here, and there is nowhere to hide in the fields, but you can see trees in the distance, on this side—different than this tree, less appealing, and so better, safer—and so that is where you will go.

Here is a thing you instinctually know: dizziness. Now you are dizzy from walking in straight lines. Around and around and around the room. Close your eyes and there you are. Around and around and around. But there are the trees. And that is safer.

You look up at them: they are so much taller than you are. They are so much older—or are they? You do not know how fast trees grow. And you know, because you have been told, that you are older than a person should be. So maybe there are some trees here who were born when you were. Or close enough. Maybe.

You will touch these ones. They are not the same. You will touch one of these and you will do it hard enough that the bark leaves a mark on your palm. It is red and the tree feels nothing like anything in the room. You feel along the grooves. The bits flaking off. Shining smoothness. If you pressed your other hand against the tree nothing would happen or it would just crumble. Not all of it. Just a part.

Soon it is going to be dark. Soon it is going to be dark all around you and you will have to live through it. Soon men will come with their lights and their guns and their faces without eyes but this time they will not be coming for you. They will think you have gone with her. They will not find you here. Not where you have climbed up into the branches and waited for the night. Soon it will be the night. Soon it will be the night and you will have to squeeze your eyes shut to shut it out. Press your hands over your ears to block it out. Soon the night will come and it will be long, long, long—but then it will be over. At least for a little while.

 

*

 

But something happens before you wake up.

You do not know that it is happening before you wake up. You do not know what is happening. You do not know anything. You are in the room and you are in the hallway. It goes on forever and you cannot find the end. But it does end: you know this. They are trying to stop you from leaving. You twist their flesh in your hands until you see the bruises coming to the surface. Him first, and then her with her red hair. Nothing feels quite real when you are dreaming: this is what you will think when you wake up. But you do not remember this until later. You are on the ground with your teeth bared, trying to get her off of you, pushing her head against the floor, and you know that somewhere there is something else: something outside of these catatonic white walls. But where is it? She is bleeding from the mouth. You left him farther back, not moving at all.

Nothing feels quite real when you are dreaming because you do not have a body in your dreams: neither does anybody else. But there he is anyway, touching you somewhere—everything a phantom limb—to pull you back. And maybe you fell back against him or straight into him or maybe he put his fingers inside of your skull to or maybe the white walls went away but then you were awake. And you remembered dreaming. And you remembered remembering.

You turn your face into the shoulder of your jacket and let out a long shuddering breath, almost a whine, shaking. Your fingers are cold. Every part of you is cold. But it is not winter.

 

*

 

The forest does not go on for very long: soon enough you are in a field again. There are things growing in it, too, things up to your knees. You walk straight through them. The sun has barely risen and there are no people anywhere. Once you have walked through three fields you hit a road and stop, scuffing the pavement tentatively with your shoe. The sun is higher now. It is getting hot.

There is somebody working in one of the fields, far off. If you want to keep walking you need to go along the edges, or along the road, maybe. People are going to start talking to you soon enough. You aren’t going to be able to avoid them, no matter how much you’d like to.

You skulk around the edges of the fields, through tall trees, until that has run out, too: only road left, here. Roads and houses. Lawns. You sit in the last little spate of woods and peel the plastic off of one of the power bars the woman gave you, peering at it suspiciously. It smells unappetizing. You are not hungry but you know you should eat. Something in you is telling you to eat.

It does not taste good. You can feel yourself making a face while you eat it and think of the man—of Tony Stark, that was his name, Tony Stark whose father was named Howard—and his ridiculous face, folding on itself, which you broke apart. There is food growing in the fields. You don’t know what. Different kinds. Different plants. You don’t remember eating anything before this but you know you have eaten. You wonder if Tony Stark will be able to eat or whether they will do something else to him. Whatever they were doing to you.

You don’t think about what they were doing to you. It doesn’t matter. It happened and it isn’t happening anymore. You didn’t know it was happening. You couldn’t do anything about it. There was nothing you could do about any of it.

It would be better if you didn’t have to eat at all, but you do. So you finish it and crumple up the wrapper, stick it back it in the pocket in its place. The sound it makes is specific. You have not heard it before. You squeeze it again, in your pocket.

You watch the workers in the field from the trees until the sun gets low enough in the sky for you to leave. They move up and down, water spray spreading out wide behind them. Sometimes they crouch down to look at something. For a while they stand at the edge of the field, leaning against a post and talking to each other. You can’t hear what they’re saying but sometimes one of them laughs. And then they move onto the next one. They aren’t very big fields. They must not produce a lot of food. But here they are.

When the sun is low enough you start to walk again, head bowed, direction picked at random, down roads without sidewalks. You know they should have sidewalks. They don’t, though. Not for a while. You are walking, you realize, past houses: streets upon streets of houses, with windows and open front doors and children biking along the streets out front in the gloam, mothers calling them in as they whine; children spinning and falling over: great old trees in yards, no trees at all in others. There are so many children.

“Are you lost?” one of them asks, her skin so translucent you can see her veins beneath it, and you think of Tony Stark’s hologram and you can see exactly what her brain would look like exploding out of the back of her skull.

“No,” you tell her, pushing your hand further into your jacket pocket.

“Okay,” she says dubiously, and races back into her house when her mother calls her, voice sharp, door snapping shut behind her.

 

*

 

There is nowhere to hide out here: here there are just enough people that you will, inevitably, be seen. You cannot imagine a city—not a real one, a place you could step into with your solid feet. But you know that in a city nobody would see you. And you can hide in the forest. But you cannot hide here. So you just keep walking, along the roads lined with houses full of men and women and children, in the dark, as the cars drive by.

A set of headlights swings up behinds you, and then past you, and stops. “Hey,” a man says, rolling down his window. “You lost?”

You look at him. It is dark. The light from the headlights is echoing back at him: a ghost of something. You don’t know what. He’s wearing a suit and tie and his hair is greying along the sides. You could reach through the window and pull the key out of the ignition before he knew what was happening and have your hand around his throat before he had time to open his mouth to ask.

You wet your lips. He leans forward a little, frowning. It’s a bad suit. It doesn’t fit him—too big everywhere but the waist. He’s younger than you thought at first but he’s balding. “You need help, buddy?” he asks.

“No,” you say. You sound hoarse.

“Right,” he says, and you can see it happening: concern tipping into suspicion. You watch it for a moment, as though it has nothing to do with you, before swallowing.

“I went the wrong way,” you manage. “I—I know where I’m going now.” You pause. “Thank you,” you say, even though it sounds strange, feels strange; even though you don’t want to.

He settles back into his seat, still looking a little dubious, but you can see this, too—the slide into something else, a strange anecdote, nothing very remarkable. Not a threat. Which is wrong, of course. But right as far as he’s concerned.

“Well, you have a good night,” he says, and you step back and watch as he rolls up his window and drives away, tail lights red in the darkness.

You walk until you find a house tucked away in the corner of two streets, entirely dark, a _For Sale_ sign out front. You prowl around the edges and there really doesn’t seem to be anybody inside, but you still don’t go in—you don’t want to be inside. You don’t need to be: it’s not cold; it doesn’t matter. You tuck yourself against the back of the house instead, behind the bushes, facing nothing but trees, and pull your knees up to your chest. It is clear out tonight. The stars are clear.

There are birds chattering irritably in the branches. A couple of them fly from one tree to the other, shadows against a different darkness. You curl you fingers into your pants. There must have been birds earlier today. You didn’t notice any. But there must have been. It seems impossible that there weren’t.

You don’t remember ever seeing children before. You must have, though. You killed children. Tony Stark told you all about that. A lot of children, he said. Eight, directly. Eight children with your own hands. You look down at them, turn them over. He wanted to pull those children out of you—not them themselves, the lost babies with their bright eyes and their soft thin hair in hair clips and bowl cuts, but their corpses, their bloody corpses on the floor, to examine them. To populate your mind. You are lucky, you think, curling your fingers slowly together, that your mind cannot be populated by anything. You do not want the corpses of those children laid out in front of you all in a neat line. They are inside of you either way, whether you can see them or not.

Tony Stark was a child once. If everything had happened earlier—if he had been younger—if he had been in the car that you don’t remember, in the place that you don’t remember, with the man and woman you don’t remember—you could have killed him, too. You think about this for a moment and it doesn’t make you feel anything at all.

You stare at the trees and then up at the sky. You were a child once, too. You remember thinking that you had no mother, no father. But you must have. Tony Stark told you facts but those do not matter; that is not what you are thinking about. You know that you were a child once. Everybody was. You were a child with two arms, with two hands that could feel things. You were a child and you could remember everything that happened to you. And now you cannot remember any of that. You cannot remember being anything other than you are.

You shift and your arm shifts, making soft sounds, soft whirs and hums. It goes all the way into your brain. You know that without anybody having to tell you. You know a lot of things. Sometimes you wish you did not.

 

*

 

You wake up before the sun rises, in the morning, and make yourself eat the other protein bar, along with half a bottle of water. You should, you know, need more food—people need more food than this. But you don’t. You haven’t, yet. Maybe you will. Maybe this is just—panic. Necessity.

You keep walking. You’ll hit another highway eventually, you know. These houses—suburbs, you are in the suburbs—don’t stretch on forever. Or they do, maybe, but not without being broken up, bisected, sectioned off. So you walk.

You are starting to smell.

The sun rises slowly, hazy, the heat coming with it. It is hot here, wherever here is, but it could be worse. You have been worse, although you can’t remember it. You just take off your jacket and carry it. You don’t have anything left in your pockets anyway.

You do come to a highway, soon enough—it’s not really a highway. It’s not a highway at all. It’s a bigger road. There aren’t any houses here, except a few, far back; there are fields, and just—nothing. Things in the distance that look vaguely industrial. You don’t bother trying to figure out what they are. It doesn’t matter.

You keep walking.

You aren’t going anywhere. It has occurred to you that you aren’t going anywhere. You don’t have anywhere to go: there is that. But you cannot not go anywhere, either. So you will keep walking until something stops you. Something will eventually stop you. You know this. You are not a fool.

In the middle of the day you drink the rest of your water and sit down by the edge of the road with your back to a row of half-grown corn stalks, looking up at the sun. You are sweating. It is making you smell worse, but you don’t mind. You like it—it is a thing your body is doing all its own. That it should be doing. It is slipping down your arm, catching on the light refracting.

If anybody sees you they will see your arm. That is how you will get found. But you have no way to hide it except the jacket. And it is hot. And they will find you, eventually, anyway. And if he comes for you again you will kill him.

You get up, sweaty and dusty now, too, and keep walking. You aren’t walking fast. You don’t need to be anywhere. You come after a while to a stand by the side of the road, by the corn. You are walking on the other side, the side with woods. They are selling something. Fruit.

“Hey,” somebody says. A girl. You aren’t sure how old. Your knowledge of children is limited to killing them, apparently. Nine, maybe. She might be nine years old.

She’s standing behind the stand, rocking forward and backward, leaning her arms on the top, expression exaggerated. She must be standing on a box.

“Where are you goin’?” she asks. She’s missing one of her front teeth. You shrug.

“What’s _that_ mean?” she says, sounding disgusted.

“Nothing,” you tell her.

“You’re lying,” she says, leaning farther forward and scowling. “You are fulla _crap_.”

You look at her.

“I can say that because my mom’s inside and nobody’s here to tell me I can’t,” she says, standing up straight and tossing her hair slightly. “You don’t count. You don’t even know where you’re going.”

“Okay,” you say.

“Are you lost?” she asks, and you shrug again.

“Are you homeless?” she asks, leaning forward slightly, eyes glinting. You look at her.

“Do you have _amnesia_?” she says, practically vibrating with excitement.

“Yes,” you say, and she looks sideswiped.

“I—what?” she says.

“I have amnesia,” you say, although you don’t, not really.

“What’s your name,” she says, suspicious. You hesitate.

“James,” you say finally.

“You don’t have amnesia,” she says, supremely superior. “Nobody with amnesia knows their name.”

“Okay,” you say.

“What’s wrong with your _arm_?” she asks.

“I lost mine,” you tell her. “So they gave me a new one.”

She looks uncertain for a moment. “They can… do that?” she says. “And they look like… that?”

“No,” you say. “They don’t. Only this one.”

She looks back up at your face. “What’d you do to lose it?”

“I fell off of something very tall,” you tell her, and it will not occur to you until much later that nobody ever told you how it happened: not Tony Stark, not the woman, not anyone. But you know. You can’t remember falling—but you know that you fell.

She looks exquisitely, unashamedly horrified. “Oh,” she says, and then says nothing.

“What are you selling?” you ask.

“Um,” she says, and looks down as though she’d forgotten. “Berries. Strawberries. Raspberries. Blackberries.”

“Which ones are the best,” you ask.

“Blackberries,” she says immediately. “Tommy says I’m weird because everybody likes strawberries the most but I think he’s just stupid and a _boy_ and blackberries are the best anyway. Grandma thinks I’m right too.” She looks up from the boxes in front of her and back at you hesitantly. You take a couple of steps across the road, closer toward her. No cars have come by in all this time but one does now, and you step back again as it roars past.

“Slow down, you jerk!” she shouts after it, lost in the noise, scowling. “Well, come on,” she mutters, when you just look at her, still standing in the middle of the pavement.

“These ones,” she says, poking at a box with one finger, pushing it forward. “You can just have ‘em, I’ll tell my mom I ate ‘em. I’ve been out here all morning anyway. I sold a bunch earlier, so it’s fine.”

You look down at the berries in their little box made of wood so flimsy you think it might crumple if you picked it up with the wrong hand. She’s staring at it again, without even bothering to pretend she isn’t.

“You want to touch it?” you ask, which you had not been expecting yourself to say. She blinks, eyes wide.

“Can I?” she asks dubiously. You shrug and raise it up to rest it next to the boxes of berries.

She reaches out one tiny hesitant finger to the side, snatching it back almost before she’s touched it. “It’s hot!” she yelps.

“It’s hot out,” you say. She flexes her fingers and reaches out to touch it again, more purposefully this time, still skittish but moving along to one of the grooves.

“How does it work?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” you tell her.

“But it’s yours,” she says.

“I know,” you say.

She looks at it from top to bottom, from the shoulder all the way down to your fist. You open up your palm, silver fingers pointing to the sky. “Can you feel anything?” she asks.

“No,” you say. “Not really. Not something like that.”

“Oh,” she says, and hesitates before hastily pressing her small hand in the center of your big palm. You could break all the bones in her hand without trying. You tap your fingers to the inside of her wrist.

“That is so _weird_ ,” she whispers, and wraps her hand around your thumb for a moment before pulling it back and straightening up. “Now you have to eat your berries.”

You look down at them; you’d almost forgotten.

“They’re _very good_ ,” she says sternly. “We have the best ones _anywhere_. That’s what Grandma says and she’s never wrong about anything. Here,” she says, and picks one out and puts it in your fingers for you—the fingers still lying there in front of her, all gleaming, deadly.

You hold it for a moment, very carefully, before squeezing it just as carefully and watching as the juice from inside, the pulp, bleeds purple over your fingers. It is the most real color you have seen since you have left that building. You look down at it for what feels like a long time and then you put your fingers in your mouth and you suck it in, juice and all, and it tastes—it tastes—you don’t have the words for what it tastes like.

“They’re good, right,” the girl says, grinning smugly around her missing tooth, rocking back and forth. “You’re not supposed to _squish_ ‘em, but. They’re good.”

You swallow, even though there isn’t anything in your mouth anymore. “Yeah,” you say. “They’re good.”

She lights up, and you want to touch the soft vulnerable parts of her, the parts you could put a knife through, the parts you could grab and wrench apart in an instant, and leave nothing left—nothing but a corpse, and a ghost. You want to cover her with steel to take those soft parts away. What will happen to her, when she gets older and they get bigger? What will happen, otherwise?

But then she would be like you.

“I need to go,” you tell her, and pick up the box with your other hand. “Thank you for the berries.”

“Bye,” she says, and watches you as you walk away. “Be careful!” she shouts, and you don’t know what exactly she means, or why she said it, but you want to say it back. You don’t. You keep walking.

 

*

 

You fell. Where did you fall from? And where did you go? It doesn’t matter anymore, you guess. It doesn’t matter. You know where you have ended up, and that is America: sprawl. You carry the jacket over your arm when you get back to where the people are. Some of them, you know, will recognize you. There is no way around it. One way or another, sooner or later—it will all happen. You keep walking.

You come to something that looks almost like a real highway, and something that isn’t really a city but might be: sidewalks, buildings pushed up against each other. Really it is a town. It starts to rain and you feel your face curl, twisting in on itself. You have stopped walking. It wasn’t on purpose. But here you are. It is raining. It isn’t raining hard. It isn’t cold. But it is raining.

You turn your hand up, watch the water collecting there, little droplets; watch your fingers shift as they move. Your shirt blows against your back. You can feel it. You can feel water. Your teeth are very smooth. You wonder why they bothered.

In a park, on a bench, you watch people walking by, heads bowed against the rain, holding their raincoats closed, purses thunking against their hips, umbrellas flapping. Children stepping emphatically in what barely count as puddles; children getting dragged along by their mothers, hiding their faces from the water. Men under hats.

Nobody is paying attention to you now. You push your hair back from where it is plastered on your face. You haven’t gotten a glimpse of yourself yet. You will soon, you guess. You run your thumb up the side of your nose, along the ridge of your brow, and let it sit there.

This time when you dream you are in the room and it is dark and you are in the corner with your knees pulled up to your chest and if you don’t move maybe nobody will see you and nothing will happen and nobody will come and there is no light except from the moon but that is enough and you know it you know it you—

You’re so wet that when you sit up from where you’re curled up on the bench you have to shake your hair out of your face, like a dog. It’s not raining anymore: the sun is just starting to rise.

Your feet squelch in your boots as you walk, along the sidewalk with no real direction in mind. Maybe you should buy something. Food. You should eat. You should get clean. You stink. People are starting to notice. Nobody is out now, though. You like that. You like being out here, with the buildings, and the sidewalks, without the people.

You step out into the road, where the light is starting to come in, skittering along the ground. You hear the footsteps first. Nobody is out.

“Bucky?” he says, from behind you, and you know that it is Steve.

 

*

 

How do you know? You don’t—you don’t—something crawls over your skin, electric up and down your spine. You don’t turn around.

“Bucky?” he says again. The pavement is drying but it’s still damp. Your hands are dripping.

 _No_ , you want to say, _that’s not me_. But it isn’t like you are anything else, either.

You hear him walk one step, another, and stop. “I—Bucky,” he says. “I’ve been—we’ve been—looking for you, and—”

You should turn around, probably. You should get it over with. There is no life in which you can walk forever with him following, and never turn to look. You put your hands in your pockets.

“Nobody else is here,” he says slowly. “I didn’t—I didn’t tell anybody. They’ve been—talking. About what to—they would have wanted to come. To bring—I didn’t tell them. Stark set up a—well, Stark was helping me.” He lets out a huff of shaky laughter. “Who’d have thought.”

You turn around. It takes two steps. And he is—there. Steve. The burning glittering light of him, cohered into a body, a real body that is not like your body, and you want to put your hands over your eyes and crouch down and not be seen, not be here, not be anywhere. But you can’t do that. You don’t move.

Steve sags. “Bucky,” he says hoarsely. He’s got his shield strapped across his back, covered with something. Stupid. It wouldn’t fool anybody.

“I don’t remember you,” you tell him.

He sucks in a breath. “You did,” he says. “You did—”

“I don’t remember anything,” you say.

A muscle in his cheek twitches. “I saw the—I—I read the file on you, Bucky,” he says. “I saw what they—”

“I don’t,” you say, “remember. Anything.”

He stops talking, and just looks at you. You want to run away. Something inside of you is shaking so badly you’re sure he can see it. You want to twist one of your fingers until it breaks. You want it to stop.

“Where have you been, Bucky?” he asks.

“That’s not me,” you tell him. “That’s not my name.” He doesn’t say anything.

“I don’t know where I was,” you say. “I don’t remember.”

“It’s been—months—”

“What year was I born?” you ask, and he looks startled.

“1918,” he says.

“It’s been more than months,” you say, and then wish you hadn’t, because of the way it makes him look.

“I was in a room,” you tell him. “There was a tree outside.”

He stares.

“What—”

You turn and start walking down the street. You can’t look at him anymore. Besides, it doesn’t matter—he’ll follow you anyway. You know that. Now that he’s found you, you won’t be able to get away from him. You knew they were going to find you, and this is how it has happened: Steve in the street of this town in the middle of America somewhere, with the before-morning sun just starting to creep into his hair and turn it gold, illuminating every solid part of him: his shoulders under his jacket, his empty clenching hands, the faintly damp skin of his cheek, his neck, the tendon and veins beneath. You could kill him, you know: a quick snap, a nick of the flesh. You could kill him because he isn’t prepared for it.

You want to hit him—hard, for being stupid—and leave him there, and go somewhere else. Somewhere where time does not elapse, and memory does not accumulate, and you do not look at a body as a map.

You keep walking.

“Bucky—wait—” he says, hurrying after you, of course.

“I’m not that person,” you tell him.

“You just asked me what year you were born,” he points out. He’s walking closer to you now. You step to the right. He doesn’t do the same—he isn’t that stupid, at least.

“James Buchanan Barnes,” you say. It still feels wrong in your mouth.

“Yes,” he says eagerly.

“I don’t know him,” you say, and don’t turn to look at him.

“But—it’s _you_ ,” he says.

“I don’t remember anything,” you tell him, digging your fists even deeper into the pockets of your jacket. At this rate you might rip through the lining.

“But that doesn’t mean—that doesn’t mean you aren’t _you_ ,” he says, slightly desperately. He’s still lagging behind you, hurrying to catch up. You are walking very fast. You stop and look at him, as he stumbles a few steps too far. He is not very good at his uncanny body. You think he is better when he is fighting. You don’t remember this, precisely. But you think you know it.

“What does that mean,” you say, and he stops, and opens his mouth, and closes it again. A stubborn look comes over his face.

“You’re _you_ no matter what they did to you,” he says. It is a banality. That is not a word you have used and it surprises you for a moment, distracting. But it is true: it is banal. You know what else he will tell you, sometime soon: _they made you do it_ , whoever “they” are. It was not your fault. Not you. _You don’t even remember it_. Now that—the forgetting—becomes helpful.

You could kill him. It would not even be difficult. You know every warm soft spot on every child’s body: every one that gives easily. Every way to break them the most quickly. The way a skull explodes. A gun in your hand. Tony Stark’s face collapsing under your fist. It doesn’t matter. None of it matters. Your hands are what they are.

You don’t have anything to say to him to make him understand so you just start walking again, and he follows.

“I know,” he starts, and swallows. “I know you don’t remember anything—now,” he says hesitantly. “And that’s—it’s fine, Bucky. It’s fine.” He’s lying. You aren’t stupid. Anybody would be able to tell. “But that doesn’t mean—people’s memories don’t just _vanish_ ,” he says. “It’s—”

You want to cover your ears with your hands, want cars to go by, want to make as much as noise as you can—anything, anything to make him stop. You are so tired, suddenly. You cannot remember being tired. Maybe you just did not realize it. Now that Steve has found you, you are found: it is over. And either Tony Stark will kill you or people will tell you for the rest of your life that you can get it all back, everything that you are supposed to have lost. Everybody will ask you what you remember. Steve will ask you to remember him and other people will show you photos of the bodies of the dead and ask you to remember blood on your hands, ask you question after question about what occurred. And you will have no answers for any of them.

A car goes by and you have to move over to stand by the side of the road. He stops talking. You both stand there for a moment. He’s watching you, you know, but you don’t look back. Your hair is drying out, a little, but there’s still water dripping down your back.

“I’m hungry,” he says finally. “You want breakfast?”

You blink, startled.

“Yeah,” he says. “Come on.”

 

*

 

The diner is dimly lit, faintly grimy, nearly empty, given the hour. Steve slides his shield under the table and slides himself into the booth after it. You look down at the table, at the little salt and pepper shakers, the packets of sugar squeezed into the plastic container, the bottle of ketchup next to the napkins. Your mind is full of so many things you do not know how you know. You could open your mouth and words would fall out like pearls. Or maybe you are an automaton. Clack clack clack. Here is a list of things that are. Here is the absence of history.

You sit down on the opposite side of the booth. It squeaks. You are still wet. Nobody is paying attention to you.

The waitress, when she comes over, miraculously seems not to recognize Steve at all. She sets down two glasses of water without paying much attention to what she’s doing. They spill over, just a little. “Coffee?” she asks, flipping open a pad and clicking down on her pen with an excess of force.

“Please,” Steve says.

She vanishes.

He turns back to look at you. If you closed your eyes maybe he would disappear.

“I know,” he says, “it must be—really confusing. For you. Right now.” He’s turning his glass in his hands. “I can’t—it was bad enough for me, after—after all that time, and you—” He pauses, frowning down at his water.

It isn’t, though—you don’t know how to explain this to him. You don’t think you could explain it to anybody. But here is Steve: _why would he come?_ you asked, all that time ago—you don’t know how long. You are only really becoming able to account for time. And here is Steve, throwing himself toward you with no modicum of grace. You are still not very good at time but even you know that it has not been very long: minutes, really, since he appeared. But you can feel it. Whatever in him is straining toward you. Of course you can see the white fire shining from inside his cracks: you were lying. He is the only thing you remember. But—that is something else. It is unspeakable.

You do not feel very confused about anything. You know certain things to be true. Other things you cannot know. Other things remain in the darkness. You are in the world. That is what has occurred.

The waitress brings the coffee and two menus, and walks off without saying anything else. Steve picks them up and passes one over to you.

You open it, and stare at the list of food: endless, numbered, small lettering. Your head hurts.

“I’ll order,” Steve says. You can feel him watching you. You should argue with him but it’s not worth it. You are cold and wet and you can’t take your jacket off because of—well. And you don’t care what you eat, anyway. It doesn’t matter.

Neither of you says anything until the waitress comes back, even though you can feel Steve practically twitching at the difficulty of keeping it in. You watch the street through the window, instead. Nobody’s out, still, but a car goes by occasionally. The sun is getting slightly brighter. Steve taps the side of his glass.

When she finally does come to take their orders, Steve rattles off a list of food that makes even you, who have no experience with food at all, turn to stare. The waitress is unmoved.

“He’ll have the pancakes,” he says, handing her the menus. “And, well, we’ll share. The rest.”

“Sure,” she says, and walks away.

“Must be a difficult job,” Steve says, somehow dutifully, and then coughs a little, sounding embarrassed.

“Okay,” you say.

“Well,” he says. “I guess I should—it’s been pretty… messy, since everything—happened. I mean, SHIELD’s gone. _Gone_ ,” he repeats, meaningfully, as though that should be important to you for some reason. “But that left the rest of us, to… figure everything out.” He looks down at his water again, and scratches at the side of his neck. “Natasha had leaked all the records from—the entire history of SHIELD, basically—well, I guess leaked isn’t the right word. She dumped them all online. You weren’t there,” he says, trying to be reassuring, which wouldn’t work even if you didn’t already know that Tony Stark had put the pieces together, found you in your absences. They’re stupid if they thought somebody wouldn’t be able to do that. You are a ghost, after all. Ghosts aren’t nothing.

Besides, you don’t have any idea what the fuck he’s talking about anyway, outside of what you’ve heard before.

“They were all… talking about you a lot,” he says hesitantly. “There were obviously—differences of opinion. About—I mean, there was a lot of discussion.” Probably some of them wanted to take you out my any means necessary. And others probably wanted to take you in and question you. Here are the bodies of the dead. And then there would have been Steve.

“Stark wound up helping me out,” Steve says. “Had a change of heart about it, I guess. Anyway, that’s—he can get at pretty much all the security footage everywhere in the country. He also,” he adds dryly, “offered to tap everybody’s mobile phones and email accounts for mentions of somebody with a metal arm, but I told him I wasn’t interested.

“Tony’s Howard’s son,” he says, as though that might mean something to you. It does, but not in the way that he thinks. “Howard Stark—we knew him, back—in the war. He was famous, I couldn’t believe—” He laughs. “Stark—Tony—hates him. Because he’s like him, probably. But I liked Howard more. He was less of an—asshole. But maybe he was by the time he was that old.” He pauses. “I don’t think he was a very good dad. He probably has his reasons—Tony, I mean. I don’t think Howard had a very good time. Peggy talks about him sometimes. He wasn’t—it doesn’t sound like he had a very good time, after we—you know.” He looks sad, in a deep, old way. You want to close your eyes. “He died a while ago. That was pretty awful, too, I think.”

You do close your eyes for a moment, and breathe in: one, two.

“We knew Peggy in the war, too,” Steve says, as an afterthought, and you want to lie down in the booth and go to sleep.

Fortunately the food comes shortly after. Steve has so many plates in front of him you feel vaguely nauseated, which is also new, and therefore novel. You stare down at the pancakes in front of you. There are cut-up strawberries on top.

“Anyway,” Steve continues, in-between enormous mouthfuls of eggs and toast, “I’ve been—I’ve been looking. I’ve had some help but—it’s hard to trust anybody, not even—” he pauses. “It’s just hard.” He looks up at you. “But I found you,” he says, and he sounds like a child. You cut off a piece of your pancakes with your fork.

“You should use the syrup,” he says through his food, and gestures with a fork. You look at the little pitcher on the side of your plate and pick it up. For a moment you want, irrationally, to just—drop it. But you don’t. You drizzle some of it on the pancakes instead, and put it back down.

He’s watching you as you put the first bite into your hands. You wish he wouldn’t. You don’t want anybody to look at you, him least of all. But you forget, just for an instant, because—it is _good_. The thought is clear and certain. It is good.

Steve is smiling. You can practically fucking hear it. It annoys you. That is novel, too. You want it to go away. You just keep eating and ignore him.

If Tony Stark were here, right now, you would kill him. The knowledge is satisfying. You can imagine how he would have said it. To Steve. That he would help. Imagine how he would have lied. You wonder if his father was a liar. You don’t think Steve likes liars much. But of course the trick is to be able to tell when people are lying.

Neither of you says much while you eat. You can’t focus on much besides the food. Your stomach, you think, is not going to react well to this. You should have had toast and an egg. You don’t care.

At some point you look up and Steve is just sitting there watching you with an expression on his face that is so—so—something that you have to look down again. It makes you want to leave. It makes you want to close your eyes and sleep and wake up empty. He takes another bite of his eggs.

When you finish he sits back, visibly satisfied, and looks out the window. It’s brighter now, and signs of life are returning, although it’s still too early for there to be much activity.

“We’re gonna have to figure out what to do,” he says, as though the two of you are a we. A team. “I don’t—I can’t just bring you back there. There are people—” He gets that stubborn look again, jaw set. “We need to figure something out. To convince them—”

“I don’t want to do that,” you tell him, which is true. It should feel good to want something but it doesn’t. It just is.

He blinks, pauses. “I—” he starts, and then continues very slowly. “I just want to help you,” he says. “We can figure out what to do that will help you. Okay? Whatever that’s going to be. I—”

You push your plate back a little and fold your arms in front of you. Your sleeve rides up a little—you notice because he looks down for a moment before catching himself.

“You said—Tony Stark was helping you,” you say, and he looks a little surprised.

“Yeah,” he says. “He—”

Your fingers tighten in your jacket.

“He wasn’t,” you say.

He stares. It is so easy—too easy—to read his face. It is so easy it is painful. And looking at his face is painful anyway. Everything about him is painful. Normally you can bury it—but—you need to bury it. You need to do it. But this is not like other things.

“How would you know?” he asks—simply, just baffled.

You look at him.

“Bucky,” he says slowly, and you twitch. “How would you know?”

“When’s the last time you saw him?” you ask. “Tony Stark.”

He blinks. “I don’t—a week ago? More?” He makes a face. “I see him more than I want to, even if he has been helpful.”

“And nothing stopped working,” you say, though that’s self-evident: he found you.

He’s frowning again. Maybe JARVIS is still—broken. Maybe he’s being helpful. But if Tony is in a hospital somewhere, or—you think of his suits, his shoes, his featureless building in the middle of nowhere—somewhere else, being attended to by private physicians, still unconscious—then who would have fixed JARVIS? You try to think. You got the impression, from the way Tony talked, from what Natasha said, that he was Tony’s and Tony’s alone. Besides: how many people could possibly know how to do—that? Artificial intelligence, Tony said. Something out of nothing.

“JARVIS is broken,” you say, flat. “That’s why your cameras are still working.”

He stares. You look down.

“Tony Stark wasn’t helping you,” you tell him. “He was lying.”

Steve doesn’t say anything. You think he is too stunned to speak.

“Was his father a liar?” you ask, because you want to know.

“I—Howard?” he says faintly. “He—I don’t know. No. When I knew him he wasn’t a liar. He said stuff that was—crap, sometimes, but it wasn’t—sometimes he told you the truth even when he shouldn’t have. He didn’t always—get it.” He paused, rubbed at his eyes. “There was a lot of stuff he didn’t talk about but I don’t think he was lying.”

He probably, you figure, turned into a liar with age. This is what happens to people. You know this. It is deep inside of you. Steve, of course, has not lied to you once yet—you think. You think you would be able to tell. You think he would be terrible at it.

“How do you know that JARVIS is broken?” he asks eventually.

“That woman did it,” you say. “Natasha. Romanoff.”

He lets out a weird little sound—a breath, but with noise. He watches you, waiting.

“She decided I was not a threat,” you tell him. “After—study.”

He lets his elbows thunk down on the table, head resting in his hands. He’s trembling.

“She helped,” you offer. You do not know either of them—you do not know anything. But you are not stupid.

“Jesus,” he says. “Fuck.” So you don’t say anything for a while.

He rubs a hand over his face and folds his arms on the table in front of him. “What do you mean,” he says tersely, looking down at the empty plates, “by—study.”

“Tony Stark,” you start, and pause. “Found me.”

“When,” he says.

“I don’t know,” you reply. “I can’t—keep track. I can now. But I—couldn’t.” His fingers twitch.

“What were they doing to you,” he says, voice terse.

“I don’t know,” you say. “I don’t remember.”

“God damn it, Bucky—” he starts, and then stops himself, teeth clicking together.

“Nothing,” you say with a shrug. “I don’t remember anything, when I was awake.”

He stares at you, finally.

“What do you—”

You shrug again.

“He talked about my brain,” you tell him, which is the least of it. “He and somebody were looking at my brain.”

“He and—” he starts, and goes pale. “He and—and—”

You look at him, uncertain.

“At least he—talked to somebody else about my brain,” you amend. “I’m not sure—I’m not sure.”

“Sorry, I—fuck,” he says, and presses the heels of his palms into his eyes. “I usually don’t swear,” he says, slightly muffled. It makes something in your chest hurt, for some reason. You don’t know why.

“Fucking—all of them,” he says, when he’s put his hands down. His voice is hoarse. “All of them.”

You don’t know what he’s talking about so you don’t say anything. His eyes are flicking around, looking at something in his mind that you can’t get at. “Maria and Sam,” he mutters, “couldn’t—Nick and Phil would have wanted to—but—”

He looks down at his hands, which are curled on the table. “There’s nobody,” he says, voice small. You know, because Tony Stark told you, that he used to be a much smaller man. You can almost imagine it.

“I wouldn’t have gone with you to anybody anyway,” you point out, and he lets out a humorless laugh.

“I guess not,” he says. “I don’t know—what to—to do.”

You look at him. You do not, in the end, know very much about him: you know what Stark told you, and you know what your memories have told you, and you know certain immutable things about him that you cannot explain. You know that when you think about him and especially when you look at him something inside of you becomes frantic and terrible. You do not know very much about the world, either. Or, when it comes down to it, about yourself—but maybe that isn’t quite right. You think you do know you. Or at least some thread of something inside of yourself. The thing that remained when everything else burned down.

All of which comes to this: you know that you will ultimately be found, that nothing could stop this from occurring, and that with him in tow you will probably be found faster. Nobody, you think, could possibly be worse at going undetected than Steve. The truth of this bursts out of him. The fact that the waitress doesn’t know who he is or doesn’t care is, you think, some kind of miracle.

“What are we going to do?” he asks, as though you might actually have an answer, and it makes you go still, and look at him.

“I need to shower,” you say, and he lets out a little splutter of a laugh, surprised.

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll see what I can do.”

 

*

 

Steve has a motorcycle. For whatever reason, this does not surprise you.

“I’m not getting on that,” you say. It will be useless, anyway: you can’t hide anywhere with a motorcycle. You can feel something seeping into you—not memory, exactly. Knowledge. You know how to do this. To erase yourself—to pretend to erase yourself. But you are rusty.

“You’re going to have to get rid of it,” you tell him, and he looks comically horrified at the prospect.

“It’s too—flashy,” you explain. It’s getting hot again. The jacket is warm against your neck. “Everyone will notice it.” _And you_ , you think.

“I’m not sure how you think we’re going to get anywhere else if you won’t get on the bike,” he says.

“Steal a car,” you say, and he chokes on nothing.

“ _No_ ,” he says, appalled. “We are not— _stealing_ a—”

“Take a car and leave the bike,” you tell him, starting to walk away from where he’s standing next to the parked motorcycle and around behind the row of buildings. “It looks expensive.”

“But it’s—Bucky—”

“Not him,” you say without really thinking about it, and find one that looks boring, like all the other cars you’ve been seeing drive by on the road, the highway—mid-sized, silver, dusty, old.

“I can’t believe you,” Steve mutters. “And what exactly is your—”

You pull the handle off the back door and slide your fingers in, feeling around until something clicks and the door swings open. Steve doesn’t say anything, just watches as you crawl up to the front. You aren’t thinking about anything. It’s a glorious relief. You don’t have to look at him and you don’t have to think. You just have to make the car run.

“You have a lot of experience jacking cars, Bucky?” he asks, arms against the roof, head hanging below, sounding slightly brittle.

“Don’t know,” you say, but you must have some, because your hands are moving without your permission, and pretty soon the car is humming.

“God,” Steve mutters, drawing back out of the car. He leans back in. “You know, this plan isn’t going to work for that long, if we don’t have _keys_.”

“Can’t use the same car for that long anyway,” you say with a shrug once you’ve sat back up, and he runs a hand over his face before going back to get his bike.

“I’m not letting you drive,” he says when he gets back, in a tone that says clearly he is not going to abide any arguments. You don’t particularly feel like driving, so that’s fine. Steve doesn’t know what he’s doing, so you aren’t that worried about him being in control of the vehicle—it’s not like you couldn’t stop him in a heartbeat if you needed to, anyway.

He looks mournfully at his bike where he’s left it in the parking spot, with a carefully written note on top—Steve has a little notebook in his pocket, and a pen—but he tosses his overnight bag and then carefully slides his shield in the backseat of the car, as though something could happen to it if he were careless. It is another thing that makes him seem weirdly young—you guess the two of you are the same age, looking at it from one angle. But you aren’t really any age at all, and from what Tony Stark told you, time is so warped for him that he isn’t, either.

He takes a deep breath. “A shower,” he says, and proceeds to begin driving like he has a death wish.

“You are going to get arrested,” you tell him.

“No I won’t,” he says.

“Yes,” you say.

“I never get arrested,” he says, amused.

“You are Captain America,” you say, and his gaze slides over to you as he shifts his hands on the steering wheel.

“That is true,” he says, and slows down fractionally.

You drive for a while without saying anything, watching the country roll by. You curl your hand in the handle in the door. You are going very fast. It is, you figure, new and not-new. He rolls down both the front windows and both of you toss your jackets in the back: it is hot. You stink. Eventually he puts the radio on. It just sounds like noise to you, but that’s not bad: it was very quiet, before. You are glad he is not saying anything. You are glad you can watch the country and not look at him. For a while.

Eventually he pulls into the parking lot of a little run-down motel. The sun is high in the sky. He looks like—you don’t know what Captain America looks like. You’ve never seen pictures. Just the little picture on the cup you had in the room, which was not Steve. But you know that anybody who looked at Steve right now would know him. He is so definitively himself. The brightness of him in the brightness of the sun is painful.

“I’ll do it,” you say. “They’re just going to recognize you.”

He’s about to argue, you can tell, so you say, “They’ll recognize you,” again, and he turns and looks out the door, jaw clenched, before digging in his pocket.

“Here,” he says, tossing you his wallet. You catch it automatically, and then look down. Steve, you think again, is fucking stupid.

You pull on your jacket, pull your hair over your face, and tuck your hand into your pocket before getting out of the car and walking toward the motel without looking back. A bell jingles when you push the door open. You don’t like it in here but it isn’t as hard as you would maybe have thought, if it would have occurred to you to think about it at all: you are good, you think, at surviving. That is a thing you know about yourself.

Still, you stand in front of the desk for a moment, wetting your lips, before saying anything. It’s grimy in here, run-down. “I need a room for the night,” you say, and the woman looks up from her magazine.

“One bed?” she asks.

“Two,” you say.

“Thirty-nine dollars,” she says, bored, and you fumble, one-handed, with the wallet, staring at the bills, before managing to hand over two twenties.

She hands over the keys. “Down and to the right,” she says. “304. Can’t miss it.”

“Thanks,” you say. She just goes back to her magazine.

Steve’s leaning over the steering wheel when you come back, chewing at his thumbnail, and sits up when he sees you. You get in and toss him the keys. “304,” you say. “Down and to the right.”

He lets out a shaky laugh. “Well all right,” he says, and drives slowly around the complex.

He goes into the room first, pushes the door open slowly, as though he thinks there might be someone waiting inside. Who knows, there could be—but there isn’t. It’s just two beds, carpet that looks suspiciously stained, an old television. You stop just inside the door. He turns to look at you from the far bed.

“You okay?” he asks, starting to frown.

You look at the beds, at the walls, at the windows with the closed blinds and the curtains pulled over to the sides. The door is closed behind you.

“Bucky?” Steve says, and something ugly and angry thuds inside of you. _Not me_. You were wrong, when you thought you could take that name—James Buchanan Barnes—because you might as well, because you didn’t have another one. You were wrong. It doesn’t belong to you. You don’t have a name. But you don’t have any choice, now: it is yours whether you want it or not. A lot of things are yours whether you want them or not.

“I’m going to shower,” you say.

“That shirt’s going to need washing, too,” he says, and you look at him. He shrugs, smiling a little.

“You’ve stunk it up,” he says. “I’ve got spares.”

“I don’t want your clothes,” you tell him.

One of his eyebrows quirks up. “You’re welcome to sit around without a shirt on, I don’t mind.”

You look at him.

“Here,” he says, and tosses you the bag before you have a chance to say anything. “Options.”

You close the door to the bathroom behind you a little too hard, irritated, and are left in darkness. You are, for a moment, totally disoriented—you will never be able to move again, and the darkness will never lift, and—and—but then you fumble for the light switch, and manage to turn it on. It flickers, almost greenish, unpleasant.

The mirror is facing the shower, and you edge around it, finding your heart beating suddenly intensely in your chest—and then, there you are. Your face. You take a step back, and hit the tub. You look—you don’t have any words for it. That is you in the mirror. When you move the man in the mirror moves, too. You reach up and run a hand through your hair—greasy, now—to get it out of your face, scratch along your jaw, at the days’ worth of growth collected there.

You hold your hand over your eyes for a moment, breathing in and out, before turning the shower on, taking off your clothes, and getting in.

You are in there for a long time. You don’t know how long you stand there with your jaw jutting out, breathing strangely, as the water sprays you: it isn’t like the rain. It is somehow entirely different. But eventually you move along—it is awkward, with your hand, you discover, to wash your hair. You wonder if this is something anybody has ever thought before. You have probably never washed your hair. Not since it mattered. It doesn’t matter now, either—you just need to be clean enough to be—all right. You won’t smell anymore. You won’t stand out.

You dry yourself off and go through Steve’s bag. There’s absolutely nothing of interest inside: he must have packed fast, and hurried. But you do take some of his clothes, even though you don’t want to—even though the idea makes you nauseous, even though you can smell him on them, and then you have to sit down on the toilet seat and rest your elbows on your knees and stare at the floor. You put them on anyway: clothes for sleeping in, even though it’s the middle of the day. You could probably sleep now. You feel like you’ve been awake for days and days and days.

He’s sitting at the window, legs drawn up, chewing on his nail again—bad habit—peering through the blinds. He looks over at you again when he hears the door open and smiles, and you have to stop yourself from just stepping back in and closing the door again.

“Satisfying?” he asks, and you shrug, and lean against the wall. He looks at you for a moment before turning back to the window. The light is coming in in bright knives through the blinds.

“Well,” he says, clasping his hands around his knees. “I guess nobody’s gonna find us here.”

“Not today,” you say. Probably. He glances over at you.

“What were you—doing?” he asks.

“Nothing,” you say. He looks at you for a long moment. You can’t tell what the look means.

“Nobody is ever doing nothing,” he says.

You look at him. He waits.

“I wasn’t doing anything,” you say, and he shakes his head a little, leans back in his chair, the one chair in the room.

“Stark—had you—cooped up somewhere near here?” he asks. You shrug. “God. What an— _insane_ —” He stops, pressing his hand against his brow, and lowers it again. “So—”

“I didn’t kill him,” you interrupt. “We didn’t kill him. He will—wake up. Probably soon.” Maybe, you think, he has woken up already. “He will do the same thing to you that you were doing to me.”

He sighs, and leans back all the way, folding his hands behind his head. You are distracted by the bulk of his arms, the bunch and twist and pull of it: it is not a real body but it is the most real body you have ever seen. It is so much more real than yours.

“I am not,” he says, very calmly, “letting Tony Stark beat me. Not about this.”

“Good luck,” you say.

“He was—what was he _doing_?” he says, baffled. “With—why did he even care? Why _bother_?”

The sun is reflecting off the bed. There is dust in the air.

“Who knows,” you say.

 

*

 

When you wake up you don’t know where you are. Your listen to your heart beating and then listen for anything else: somewhere in the distance something roars dully. A faint rattling. Somebody else breathing.

You open your eyes.

Everything is hazy for a moment: strange blurry shapes lumped together, too colorful even in this dim light. Any color at all is too much color. But it resolves: beds. A window. A man sitting in front of it, his feet propped up, reading.

That is Steve.

He looks up, even though you haven’t made any noise, haven’t moved.

“Hi,” he says. You don’t reply. You don’t entirely believe him—believe the fact of him, believe his presence. He closes his book, finger tucked in its pages to keep his places.

“I think you’re not really supposed to sleep on top of hotel comforters,” he says. “You don’t want to see what shows up on there with a blacklight.”

There’s some response you should form to that—something you should say. You don’t—you can’t. Everything seems to be moving very slowly. You aren’t sure you can move.

“You okay?” he asks, that hint of a frown returning, and you are suddenly, viciously angry. You dig your thumbnail into your palm until it hurts, badly, and then you push yourself a little farther up the bed, until you’re almost sitting up.

He watches you without saying anything, then rubs at his neck and says, “We haven’t got any food.”

“You’re hungry again?” you ask, and he smiles.

“Not really. I like to be prepared.”

“I don’t need to eat anything,” you tell him, because you don’t. Not until tomorrow, you don’t think. Your stomach feels strange now, anyway.

“Okay,” he says. “If you say so.” You don’t bother to respond.

He flips the pages of his book absently, and as you are looking at it you remember. “Where did you have that?” you ask.

“This?” he asks, looking down at it, almost surprised. “Oh—in with the shield. I get bored sometimes. There’s an inside pocket, in that—bag, thing.

“It’s good,” he says a moment later, and you realize that is the next question a person would normally ask. You wouldn’t. You don’t care.

He tosses the book onto the bed. “Well,” he says. “Positives. I’ve got a cell phone—it’s untrackable. Practically impossible, apparently. My friend—” His face twists. “Natasha set it up for me.”

“Why would she tell you the truth,” you say. “She is a liar. She lies when it is convenient.”

“This was a while ago,” he says stubbornly. “She wasn’t lying. I—I know she does—lie,” he admits, turning red. “But she wasn’t. _Trust_ me.”

You don’t, but it seems like the kind of thing she would do—seems believable. So you let it go.

“I’ve got some money,” he continues. “Not a massive amount. But some.

“Negatives—we have a car we hotwired and no other way to get anywhere. We also don’t have anywhere to go or plan for what to do when we get there, wherever ‘there’ is.”

“And you cannot trust your friends,” you say, and he winces.

“Well, there’s you,” he says, the corner of his mouth quirking up. You ignore him.

“And you have your face,” you say, and he winces again.

“Not much I can do about that,” he says.

“Grow a beard,” you tell him. “Stop showering.”

He looks appalled at both of these suggestions. You shrug.

He sighs and scrubs a hand through his hair. “I don’t mind doing stuff without a plan,” he says. “But I don’t like not having a goal.”

“Don’t die,” you suggest. “Don’t get caught.”

He laughs hollowly. “Those aren’t very aspirational statements.”

You don’t say anything.

“Sorry,” he says. “Sorry. This is just—I don’t like people working behind my back. It’s been happening a lot recently.”

You don’t have much to say to that, so you just keep watching him. He looks down at his hands, lacing them together and pulling them in one direction and then the other.

“You said—you don’t remember anything,” he says hesitantly, and you can feel the exhaustion coming back on, so quickly that you think you could close your eyes and be asleep again in an instant. “But—you—you recognized me, you have to have recognized me—I saw your face, Bucky, when—but I mean, later on, you could have killed me and you didn’t—you _have_ to have remembered. You—you knew who I was,” he says desperately, looking up at you again. “You _knew me_.”

There is no way, you know, to explain it to him: the weird collection of brightnesses in your brain, the flare like fire and the excruciating agony all wrapped up inside of it—the knowledge of his existence. _Did I kill him. Did I do it_. Is that memory? Maybe. It is not the kind of memory he means. You can tell from his face what he wants—from his face and from what Tony Stark said to you. He wants you to talk about the war you fought side by side. He wants you to talk about the past. But all you have is the weird hot terrible beautiful light in the dark emptiness of everything that was and is him. You cannot say that—but you need to say something, to make him understand what you cannot give him.

“I asked Tony Stark,” you say eventually, “if I killed the man I was supposed to kill. I remembered that I was supposed to kill somebody and I couldn’t remember if I—did it. That was it.”

He’s looking at you like he can’t decide whether that admission is cause for celebration or defeat.

You don’t know what else to say to him—there are things you cannot say. You wonder, about what he said: _you knew who I was. You_ knew me. Those two things, you think, are not the same. You did not know who he was. In some ways you still do not. But: _you_ knew me. Yes, you think. Maybe that.

“I guess he told you,” Steve says.

“He told me a lot of things,” you tell him, and he looks at you oddly.

“Why?” he asks.

“He thought he could look inside my brain and pull things out,” you say. “But he didn’t find anything.”

“Because there wasn’t anything there, or because you wouldn’t let him?” he asks, slightly wry.

You don’t say anything. The humor fades from his face.

 

*

 

The room is dark. You notice this before you notice hands dragging you backwards, hands clamped over your mouth, something shoved inside, making you choke. Somebody is crushing your windpipe.

Interesting, somebody says.

Yeah, it’s pretty fucking weird, Tony Stark says. They are pulling off your arm.

Don’t worry, it’s only temporary, someone says, but you are strapped down now.

He’s still under?

Like a fucking baby.

This is really fucked up, Tony—

We have found your arm, he says, but you have to go get it yourself if you want us to reattach it. He points—up, up, up. Just up there.

For his own good—

How fascinating, the little man says, and you wake up.

 

*

 

“Bucky,” Steve whispers, and you nearly break his nose.

He’s crouched down right next to your bed, face reflected dimly in the light of the clock, and fortunately jerks back just enough when you swing your arm out, drunkenly almost, before realizing where you are, and pulling it close to your chest.

“Bucky,” he whispers again, coming in closer.

You curl up into the sheets—you decided to sleep on the bed tonight, instead of on the floor, since you were in the room the with someone else, and then spent an hour staring at his sleeping back before finally falling asleep yourself—away from him.

“You were making—a lot of noise,” he says carefully. His eyes are sharp—quick. He is an idiot but he is smart, Steve. You think you knew that, too.

“Go back to sleep,” you say—this is, anyway, what you want to say. Nothing comes out.

“Bucky,” he says, and, moving slowly, rests one large hand gently on your shoulder.

Your whole body convulses. You have to close your eyes and turn your face into the pillow to get away from him. Please, please just let him go away.

“Bucky,” he whispers, moving his hand along your back, over your shoulder blade and to the nape of your neck.

 _Don’t worry_ , somebody says inside of your brain. _It’s only temporary_.

Some noise comes out of you that you did not ask for and do not want, and he lets out a noise of his own in response, a low worried thing, and shifts a little closer, resting his other elbow on the mattress. He rubs your neck a little, small circles at the top of your spine.

“It’s okay,” he says. “It’s okay. It’s just me. It’s Steve.”

 _Yes_ , you feel like saying. _Exactly_.

 

*

 

You know exactly where you are, this time, when you wake up. You are in a motel room with Steve. You are under a sheet: the comforter is at the end of the bed. It is, apparently, not sanitary. It is not cold anyway, not even with the air conditioning.

It is the morning. Before the morning. There is only a little light coming in through the cracks in the blinds, behind the curtains. You are breathing slowly. In and out. In and out.

Steve is lying on the bed across from you. He sleeps, you see, curled up into a tight ball, hands tucked under his chin like he is a child—six, seven. It looks preposterous—his big body, doing that. It would look more normal, you think, on a very small person. But you suppose when the body learns something for its entire life it does not unlearn it just because the parameters of the body have changed, expanded, improved. You wonder which version of himself Steve is, when he dreams.

You look at your hand—the real one, not the one somebody else gave you—and close it into a fist. You can feel all of your fingers. Bodies learn things and sometimes they keep them—but sometimes they lose them. Sometimes they are taken away.

You have done all the things you have done—that is what matters. But when Steve tries to tell you you are who you are—the same person you have always been—what will he be able to argue? What of your body is left? Your bones. Your eyes, you guess. Your teeth.

You pick up the keys and slip out the door without putting your boots on, locking the door behind you. It is too early for anybody to be awake, except that somebody must be: it is that sort of place. You don’t see anybody, though. You creep along the back of the motel, soles of your feet bare against the concrete, and peer into the rooms one by one. Most of the people haven’t drawn their curtains well enough. Most of them have locked their doors, of course, too: people aren’t stupid. Well. Most people aren’t.

Somebody always is. Somebody is always stupid.

There are a couple of empty beer bottles outside of room 208. You discover that the curtains are only drawn halfway and the blinds are bent. There are two men inside, on double beds, passed out—more beer bottles, the detritus of junk food, and so on. They have left their car keys on the bureau, next to the door, in plain view.

You rap quietly on the window. Neither of them moves.

You come all the way back around to the other side, back to the beer bottles and the door, on which one of the numbers is hanging slightly loose. You test the handle—you could pick the lock, maybe, if necessary. You could try it, give up if you couldn’t get it quickly enough.

It clicks open. Somebody is always stupid.

You don’t run back to the room. You walk at a normal pace. Steve is still asleep, which is not surprising, since you were very, very quiet. You are good at this. This is the thing that you are supposed to be good at. It is a relief, you are finding, to be doing it—in whatever small trivial way. Something. Anything. Even just _sneaking_.

You wonder if you were always a sneak or whether they made you into one. Steve could probably tell you that but you are not sure you want to know the answer.

“Steve,” you say when you close the door behind you, but he doesn’t move. You frown. Steve is trained—Steve should react to situational disturbances, situational threats. You walk around the bed. His hand is twisted so deep into his pillow that you think he might rip it apart. None of his muscles that you can see is moving.

“Steve,” you say again, and when that doesn’t work you have to do what he did in the night and shake him out of it. You aren’t as nice about it.

His eyes snap open and he takes a long, choking breath, like he’s coming up from drowning. It would be comical in its hugeness, this expression, if it weren’t so obvious that it isn’t an exaggeration of anything. Steve’s eyes are huge and the muscles in his neck are standing out. You stand over him stupidly, not moving, watching as his eyes dart around the room, registering things, regaining some kind of footing.

“Steve?” you say, since that seems to be the only thing you are capable of doing to improve the situation, and he glances up at you and relaxes, just a little.

“Sorry,” he pants. “I—it’s nothing. It’s nothing.” But he hasn’t gotten up, doesn’t seem capable of moving. And he needs to.

So: “You need to get up,” you tell him. “Now. Sorry,” you add after a pause. “There’s a car outside. We need to leave.”

He stares up at you. “A car?”

“I stole it,” you tell him, and he keeps staring.

“You—we can’t _steal a car_ ,” he says, pushing himself up a little.

“I did already,” you say. “Let’s go before they realize.”

“No, I— _Bucky_ ,” he says, sitting up properly, looking desperate now. “We _can’t do that_. You don’t—we can’t just _take somebody’s car_. That’s—it’s—”

“Stealing,” you fill in.

“ _Yes_ ,” he says.

“Us or them,” you say, shrugging.

“That’s—” he starts, and stops, staring. “That’s not—”

“They aren’t going to report it missing,” you say, “because they had a—a whole lot of meth just sitting in an open bag next to the dresser. We should probably get rid of it soon enough anyway.”

“How the hell do you know what meth is?” Steve asks.

“Don’t know,” you say, reaching down to pick up his bag and tossing it on the end of the bed. “Come on, we’ve got to go—”

But as you’re turning to head toward the car, he reaches out and grabs your wrist. You freeze dead on the spot.

“Bucky,” he says. “We _can’t do—_ ”

But you aren’t listening to him. You’re looking down at where his hand is grasped firmly around your wrist. You can’t focus on him while he’s doing that. It’s—it’s too—

You shake him off. “Listen to me,” you say, flat. “You have two choices. You can go back to your friends. Your friends and Tony Stark. He probably pays for everything. You can take me with you or leave me; the same thing will wind up happening to me either way.

“Or,” you say, “you can steal things.”

He looks up at you. “It’s wrong,” he says.

“I don’t care,” you tell him, because you don’t. Maybe the Bucky he is remembering would have cared. Maybe the Bucky he is remembering would have been—appalled by this, would have hit you and told you off, called the cops, turned you in. But you aren’t that Bucky anymore—you aren’t that person at all. You—

He’s looking at you with an expression of horrible sadness in his eyes. “That’s exactly what you would have said,” he says, smiling a little, melancholy. “That is—” He swallows.

You look at him for a long moment, and then you pick up the bag and walk out to the car. It doesn’t take long before he’s jogging out after you, clothes he was sleeping in balled up in one hand, shield in the other.

You look at him, sidelong, as you drive away, drive west. “You would have argued,” you say. “Before. If I had said that.”

His eyes flash over to you. “Is that what you remember?” he asks, trying so hard not to sound hopeful that he comes around the other side.

“No,” you say. “I can tell on your face.”

“Oh,” he says. “Well. Yes. That’s exactly what I did.”

“And I bet you always won,” you say.

“Yes,” he says, without pleasure. “I always won.”

 

*

 

Steve sulks for a while, in the car, sore at having stolen it. You bet Steve has never stolen anything in his life. Maybe you have. Back before, that is—it doesn’t make sense to think of stealing, in what came after.

“Can you look and see if the registration’s in the glove compartment?” he asks eventually, and you turn to look at him, blink.

“What,” he asks, slightly peevish, “you recognize meth and know how to hotwire a car but don’t know about registrations?”

This is apparently true, because a moment later he looks chagrined. You pull the glove compartment open, though, and find, under a crumpled package of cigarettes, several half-eaten boxes of candy, and an unopened box of condoms— _optimistic_ , you think, involuntarily—some not very well-looked-after paperwork.

“If you feel that guilty you can get money to Travis Jefferson sometime,” you say, and it does seem to make him feel better—he relaxes a little, running a hand through his bright hair, lit up by the sun, before returning it dutifully to its place exactly on the right place on the steering wheel. This strikes you as bizarre, given how recklessly he drives, but what do you know? Steve is a mess of contradictions.

You are going west—you can tell, instinctually—and the land is getting flatter, emptier, except for more half-grown crops. You like watching it go by, now that you are used to the car, and have gotten Steve to drive slightly less suicidally: the fields. The occasional far-off houses. The kicked-up dust. The blue sky and its faint scrapings of clouds.

“It doesn’t look that different,” Steve says. “Out here.”

“You’ve been here?” you ask. You aren’t sure why you’re surprised.

“Yep,” Steve says, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. “Back when—after the, you know, procedure, and before I got into the war, they had me traveling around. Inspiring the people at home. Trying to get them to buy war bonds.” He lets out a little snort. “Propaganda.

“Anyway, we went all over,” he says. “I guess if you looked closely everything would be different. Just like anywhere. But from here it doesn’t look like it’s changed that much.”

You look out the window again. You cannot imagine what everything must have been like, when Steve was young, before his age did not mean anything—before his body became strange and not quite a real thing. You wonder if he would go back there, if he could. You guess you could ask him. Something inside of you shudders at the thought, cringes away from it.

So instead you don’t say anything, just keep watching the country go by, and Steve puts the radio on, fiddling with it until it’s playing something that he seems to like; you aren’t paying attention. You don’t have much of a grasp, you think, on music. It doesn’t sound like anything to you. But it fills up the space, which you suppose is why Steve has put it on. To avoid the fact that you aren’t talking.

You keep thinking about it: whether Steve would go back. It is a weird question—obviously it is impossible. Probably, you think, Steve does not spend a lot of time thinking about this. Steve seems very dutiful. This makes sense. Anybody named Captain America would have to be dutiful. But he must have thought about it at least a little. Because it is a weird question—but Steve’s life has been weird.

“Would you go back?” you ask, because you can ask. Even if it makes something inside you cringe. You can do it. Nobody is going to stop you.

Steve goes still. “I—go—”

“To—before,” you say. “If you could, would you—”

“To the—to the war?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” you say. “To whenever.”

He doesn’t say anything for a long time. “There’s one moment,” he says finally, sounding stiff. “There’s one moment I’d go back to.” His fingers have gone tight on the steering wheel.

That night, when you are in another motel, eating cheap sandwiches on bread that tastes like nothing, you find yourself thinking: _I fell_. You look over at him. He isn’t looking at you. He hasn’t looked at you all day.

You wonder where it was, and how it happened. You wonder not because it matters to you but because you know—you know in your gut—that he thinks about it every day. Whatever it was.

But you will not ask about that. It is not yours anymore.

 

*

 

The next place smells like rotting wood—you have managed to find some trees—and bills itself as a vacation spot: it’s on a lake. Maybe some of the people here are here for vacations, you wouldn’t know. You don’t see many people at all, even though it’s the summer. A few, scattered along the water, much farther down. The sand—mud—whatever it is—squelches under your feet. You dig your toes into it and let them uncurl, and then do it again.

Steve is sitting in a rickety folding chair a few yards away, bent over, tormenting himself. Steve, you have learned, likes to torment himself. This was not information you could have provided but it does not come as a surprise. You think that _Captain America_ sounds like somebody who should be certain. Steve is the opposite of that. But maybe that is just the situation in which he has found himself. You wouldn’t know.

“We need a plan,” he says eventually.

“Do you have one?” you ask. You don’t. You don’t think this was ever required of you.

“No,” he says.

“I’m not very good at plans,” he admits a moment later.

You turn back to the water, and your feet. You should be more concerned, probably. You can’t quite be bothered. It’s not that you are pleased: you aren’t. You are realistic.

“You’re going to run out of money at some point,” you say. This is another reason to be realistic.

“I know,” he says, annoyed, and then sighs. You look at him again. He looks tired. Haggard. There is still, though, some throbbing vein of light inside of him, that peeks through the cracks when you look at him. You wonder if it will always be there. You hope so. Maybe it means that you will always know him, somehow, no matter what they do to you—no matter what anyone does to you.

Your arm shifts, clicks.

“I just have to—convince them,” he says, “that you aren’t dangerous.”

You look at him for a long moment.

“I am dangerous,” you say, and he looks up at you, startled.

“But,” he starts, and then stops. “But you won’t—I mean, you’ll be _fine_. You’ve been fine, you’ve been—not what I was expecting.”

You tilt your head to the side. “What were you expecting?”

His cheeks go pink. “I don’t—I don’t know,” he says evasively. “Not anything _bad_ ,” he hurries to add. “Just—I don’t know,” he says again, slumping back in his chair. “You were—you hardly said five words to me. Mostly consisting of ‘shut up.’ And you were just—” He pauses. “The way… that you were… doing what you were doing,” he says carefully. “It was very—deliberate, but—I mean, you’d do something like rip the door off of a car and then just—leave it. What does that—I mean, what was I supposed to expect you’d be like?”

And you see it, in his face: disappointment. Because, you think, if you had been the broken-down being he is clearly imagining, right now—maybe you could have become this other person. The person he was missing. Maybe after a long time that might have been possible. An empty space turning into a full one. But you are not, you realize suddenly, an empty space. There is something inside of you. Something that exists.

“Well, you found me,” you say. “And when you found me I was not your old friend James Buchanan Barnes.”

He looks at you for a long moment. “But you aren’t somebody else, either,” he says thoughtfully, and your skin prickles unpleasantly.

 

*

 

You watch Steve as he sleeps, moonlight clear on his face. He has a beard now, or the beginnings of one. It looks, you think clinically, good. You wonder if he ever had a beard before or if this is the first time. He does not look like a man who would have grown a beard voluntarily, but war makes men do all sort of things they would not normally do. Still: Captain America.

He is curled up in bed with his hands under his chin and something deep in your gut hurts, badly. You want to cut yourself open from neck to navel and put him inside. It wouldn’t work, now, not with him this size—he’s too big. Maybe before. How else to keep a person safe? You are made of metal. Not just your arm. Your brain can be made and remade over and over again but your body is metal and cannot be broken or defeated.

Maybe, you think, this has been happening forever. You have no way of knowing. You never will, you suppose. You have to keep going anyway.

You dream that Steve is lying on the bed next to you, arm tucked under his head, looking at you contemplatively.

What? you say.

Nothing, he says.

Not nothing, you say, because you can tell.

Really, he says, but you have never seen anybody look so sad.

 

*

 

You sit out by the lake again, feet dirty, hair blowing faintly in the wind. Steve is reading his book. He’s nearly finished. Clouds are passing in front of the sun, the light glancing off the water and then going dark again, the leaves in the trees whispering together.

Steve is, of course, right: you should have a plan. But the problem, as you see it, is that there is no plan possible. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to hide. No money to hide with. Faces that cannot be hidden.

Something rustles.

You go still.

It happens again. And stops.

You glance at Steve. He is still reading his book, a line between his brows, engrossed. You have no idea how he has managed to not die in all the years he has been alive. You raise one hand and reach over to put it on his. What was it Tony Stark said? It had not made sense at the time. _Your boyfriend_. This will not look strange.

Steve stares down at it. The metal gleam in the sunlight. He turns to look at you. You hope your expression is clear enough to say what you cannot say aloud—but it must be, because his eyes go hard and practical for a moment before things begin to happen very quickly.

There are four of them—why they only sent four, you find yourself thinking, irritably, while trying to fight them off, is a mystery. They are all very featureless sorts of people—featureless clothes, featureless faces, featureless weapons. But they are not bad. They are, in fact, good. They are so good that when Steve hurls himself out of his chair—straight over his chair, actually, knocking it to the ground—to go for his shield, which is propped only a few feet away, against the wall of the cabin—he doesn’t make it. You see, for an instant, the look of sheer unadulterated panic on his face, before it is gone, replaced by familiar stubbornness, as he starts to fight with his fists and his feet and the rest of his body.

And then you remember something very clearly: you remember him saying, _I’m not going to fight you. I’m your friend_. And you remember him dropping the shield—that same shield, you know it is the same one, there is only one—out of some terrible burning place, and surrendering. And you remember not only the shattering light of him but also his body, which he, for a while, gave up to you.

And you are very, very angry.

Unlike Steve you were not stupid enough to leave your weapon even a few feet away from you; you were, however, stupid enough not to procure anything more than the knife the woman gave you before you left that other place. But it is a good knife—and you are good with even a bad knife. You know this about yourself just as well as you know what your own hands look like. So it is not of great concern that two of the men are dragging you backwards, away from Steve, one grabbing your hair, arm pressing into your throat, while the other grabs you around the middle, pinning your left arm to your side with what feels like his entire bodily force: they are stupid enough to leave your other one, which is more than enough.

Motherfucking Christ! one of them shouts when you stab him in the leg, staggering backwards. The other one has let go of your hair but is prepared for you now: he ducks away when you come at him, but he can’t fire his gun, because Steve and the other men are behind you, and so he has to try to fight you with knives, and his fists, and so no matter how good he is, he is doomed. You bare your teeth at him. His eyes go wide.

You break his arm and then you break his neck, and you take his gun and you shoot his friend in the eye before he has time to beg, pathetically, for his life. And then you walk over to where Steve is fighting off the other two, bleeding from the arm, looking infuriated, glancing over at his shield too often, not losing but not winning—he should have won by now, you think, why has he not won?—and you pull one of them backwards, arm tight around his neck, and gut him. He makes a high-pitched choking noise as his body folds open, and Steve stares for a moment before remembering himself and ducking out of the way, just missing a hook to the jaw.

It’s useless, of course, and the last man standing knows it, but Steve is breathing heavily, bleeding heavily, and all the things you wanted to do to Tony Stark you would do to this man three times over. You settle, in the name of efficiency, for pulling him backwards, too, and slamming your fist into his face so hard he falls down, looking dazed. You do it again a few more times, for good measure, until he’s crying for you to stop, and then you twist his head away, roughly, and cut his throat, watch the blood spurt out, just so.

You lean back, crouching, knife hanging from your hand, and turn to look around. There is nobody anywhere. No people: no men in black, no vacationers, no people hiding out or passing through. It is wrong. It is all wrong.

You turn around, toward Steve. “We need to go,” you say. He’s sitting on the ground, legs splayed in front of him, leaning on his good arm, shaking slightly, and staring at you.

You want to say something—flippant, maybe. _Surprised_? What’s there to see that he hasn’t already seen? And suddenly there is inside of you something horrible and desperate, something crying _don’t be mad, don’t be mad, don’t be mad, I was doing it for you, it was all for you, don’t you get it, don’t you see_. Steve, you think, believes in goodness, and in badness: you do not know if you believe in things at all but if you do that is not one of them. There are only things that are necessary and unnecessary.

“Bucky,” he says. “You’re—” And then he leans forward, and reaches out, over the body, which is still pouring blood into the dirt, and puts his hand on your cheek. You shudder, clenching your jaw so your mouth doesn’t sag open.

And then he takes his hand away and it is all red.

“Oh,” you say. He closes his hand into a fist, smearing it in, looking at the bodies.

“We need to go,” you say.

“What about them?” he asks.

“They know we were here anyway,” you say. “Doesn’t matter.”

“Which they, though,” he mutters, and you frown.

“Doesn’t matter,” he says, sounding inhumanly tired, and stands up. When he reaches down to give you a hand up you take it without thinking, and then your hand is bloody, too—but that seems about right.

 

*

 

You rub the blood off of yourself over the sink while Steve throws things into the car, one-handed. You look down at your shirt: that is splattered, too. So you take it off and clean off your side, your shoulder, too.

You walk out to the car with it balled up in your fist, sopping from where you rinsed the worst of the blood out. Steve looks up from the back and stops moving, staring. You look down. You are, you guess, not much of a sight: too many scars. Not enough flesh. Not a real boy anymore. Oh well. Too late now.

“Uh,” Steve says. “We should—do you need a shirt?”

“Thanks,” you say, and he digs one out, throws it at you.

“It’s dirty,” he says, but you just shrug, and pull it on.

You don’t say anything, this time, when Steve takes off down the highway like the devil is after him: he may as well be. And Steve seems to be strangely blessed when it comes to driving— _not_ , you think, due to his own skill, which is limited, but due to some strange twist of fate. This is not how Captain America is supposed to die.

“We need to get rid of this car,” you say instead, eventually.

“I know,” he says, and not long after pulls into a used car dealership, which he must have been looking for the whole time. You’re pleased, warm and low in your gut. _You’re learning_ , you want to say, but you restrain yourself.

He peers down at his arm, which is already scabbed over, healing fast, and reaches around his seat, grabs his shield, and pushes his door open. “You can come if you want,” he says, almost—absently. He is already thinking about something else.

“I’ll come,” you say, and get out of the car when he does.

You will say this for Steve: when he goes for something, he goes for it. He slams the door of the dealership open, shield on his arm, and bursts in on the dealer—middle-aged, balding, greying moustache—and a slightly younger man with a daughter who looks to be around eleven, twelve, with you just behind.

The three of them stare.

“Excuse me, sir,” Steve says in a voice you haven’t heard before. “I need a car.”

“Oh my god,” the girl whispers.

“I’m very sorry to be bursting in on you like this,” he continues, not breaking eye contact. “But this is a matter of national security.” Both of the men perk up. “I don’t have the money to pay you right now but my friend and I really need your help, and I promise you, if you give me your card, if we make it out of this alive, I will have the money sent back here to you. I hate having to do this, sir,” he adds, so earnest it’s sickening. “But I don’t have any other choice.”

You can see, you find yourself thinking, why people do whatever he asks them to. He’s impossible to resist. Steve is not an unfunny person but there is, in this moment, no irony about him at all. People like irony, too—but they like this more.

“Of course,” the dealer says faintly. The girl’s eyes are so wide they look like they’re going to fall out of her head.

“I have money,” she says, voice high and reedy.

“Catherine,” her father says, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“I _do_ ,” she says, irritated. “I have my allowance, _and_ what I saved up from my birthday, _and Christmas_.”

“How do you still have—I’m sure it’s fine,” he says.

“But— _Dad_ ,” she hisses, “it’s _Captain America_ and—” She glances over at you furtively, and you know—you _know_ —that she knows. Even beneath the few days’ worth of beard you’re working up. Even beneath the hair. Even beneath all the accumulated years and all the accumulated blood. She knows.

It’s funny, the people who recognize you. The farm girls deep in the country, whom you’d never expect.

She pulls her dad’s head down and whispers into his ear. The dealer is still standing there, looking sort of shell-shocked. You see the girl’s father frown, and then look at you more closely. You take a step back, and watch as Steve realizes, too. He steps in front of you, automatic. You don’t need to be protected by him—but—

“What’s this, now?” the dealer asks. The other man mutters something to him that you can’t hear. You don’t need to, anyway. You know what he’s saying, or close enough.

“Oh,” the dealer says, and they all stare at you for a long moment.

“Gentlemen,” Steve says, and then adds, “ma’am,” as an afterthought. “I _really need that car_.”

The car dealer rouses himself, suddenly. “Yes,” he says, purposeful all of the sudden. There is a glint in his eye that was not there before. “I have a good one for you. You looking to go unnoticed?”

“Yes,” Steve says.

“Good,” the man says. “She’ll be good. Let me get the key.” And off he goes, into the back. You hope he isn’t calling the police.

The other man is standing with a protective hand on his daughter’s shoulder—she doesn’t seem to have the same self-preservational instincts, though.

“Are you really—you know,” she asks, eyes wide.

“Catherine,” her father says under his breath.

“ _Dad_ ,” she mutters back. “It’s only I’ve read all the history books and I recognize you,” she says. “You look the _same_.”

“Catherine,” her father says wearily, “has a hobby.”

“Yes,” you tell her. “That’s me.”

“Oh,” she whispers, hushed. “Wow.”

The door to the back room opens and the dealer emerges, holding a set of keys and an envelope with what looks to be a hefty sum of cash. Steve sees it, too, because he starts protesting before the man has even said anything about it.

But: “Stop it,” the man says, cutting him off, and he shuts up. “You should see what people pay for these pieces of shit.” Catherine giggles gleefully and her father frowns. “If I never hear from you again I’ll expense it as a charitable donation.”

“We really can’t—” Steve tries again, but the man puts the envelope in his hand anyway. Catherine looks over at you, eyes wide. You raise an eyebrow.

She and her father trail after you to the car, which is old, and crappy looking, but, the dealer says, sturdy and reliable. You toss the couple of bags you’ve accumulated from the other car into this one, and listen as Steve explains, shamefacedly, that it was stolen.

“I did it,” you interrupt. “He didn’t know. Don’t worry, he’d never approve.”

“I’m sure you had a good reason,” the dealer says equanimously.

“Yes,” you say.

“Thank you,” Steve says, exuding the messianic aura of Captain America once again. “We can’t say enough—”

“The least I can do to help my country,” the dealer says, looking slightly uncomfortable, but pleased about it.

“Don’t tell anyone,” you say.

“Please,” Steve says, painfully earnest. “Nobody—not other people, not the internet, not—anybody. Someone will probably come by and ask if you’ve seen us—”

“Don’t bother lying,” you interrupt.

“Though if you could forget what kind of car this was,” Steve said, “that would maybe be okay.”

“We won’t tell anybody,” Catherine says. “We’ll protect you.”

“Thank you,” Steve tells her, very solemnly, with complete sincerity, and she looks like she’s about to expire.

“How old do you think she was?” he asks not long after, when you’re peeling along down the road again.

“Eleven?” you guess.

“Yeah,” he says, and swallows. “God. What were we doing at eleven. You were tormenting Clarabelle Adelman that year, if I’m remembering correctly. I was mostly trying not to die.”

“Who was Clarabelle Adelman?” you ask.

“She was in love with you,” he says. “Well, lots of the girls were in love with you. Even at eleven. But she was—very obvious about it. You were awful to her. I had a huge crush on her, obviously. I don’t think I even liked her. It was very convoluted.

“Do you remember any of that?” he asks, sounding faintly hopeful, although he should know better. Of course you don’t. You find that you are glad to know it, though—the story. Steve in love with Clarabelle, Clarabelle in love with you, you—what? That is the critical unknown.

But that is the entirety of you: unknown. A blank. And Steve knew you—better, apparently, than anyone—but he was not you. He was not inside your mind. And so no matter how many stories he tells you—and you suspect he could tell them for years—you will remain a blank forever. For some things are unrecoverable.

Still: it is nice to think about, that story. It is nice to imagine.

“She was reading about us in books,” you say. “That girl.”

“I guess somebody remembers,” Steve says, and accelerates as he switches lanes.

 

*

 

There are actually a lot of people at the campsite, for once, but it’s huge, so it isn’t hard to just drive out to the very edge, and find yourselves far enough away from everyone to be able to speak without being heard. Nobody will notice Steve’s face at this distance, either, especially in the dark.

It’s hot out, still, muggy, even in the night, and you sit down in the flimsy beach chairs you bought at the huge all-purpose store before coming here. Steve, of course, had to stay in the car, which he hated, leaving you to buy the food and blankets and everything else, as usual. You bought more knives and the checkout girl didn’t even look at you twice. You didn’t have to say anything to her, either, which you appreciated. You find it easier, now, to talk to people, but that doesn’t mean you like it.

The moon isn’t quite full anymore but it may as well be. You can see the trees stretching out in front of you—where they fade out into farmland again, you don’t know—and you can see Steve next to you, after you’ve both eaten in silence, picking at the seam of his pants, clearly working out what he wants to say.

“I don’t understand why he’s doing this,” he says finally. “Stark. I don’t—” He runs a hand through his hair and folds his arms in front of him—to hide, you realize, the fact that his hands are shaking. “It doesn’t make—even if he thought you were—even if he agreed with the rest of them, why—this is—it’s too much,” he finishes. And he’s right. It is. “I mean, it could be Hydra—they’re the people who—had you. Before. But—if it is him—I don’t get it. I don’t get it.”   

You try to think about him. About Tony Stark. You haven’t, really—about the actual reality of him, not just about his name, his vague ominous presence. What he was like, in the room. The room is hard to think about, now. You remember it—it is the only memory you have of an earlier time. A before. But it is hard to place yourself there. It is not exactly as though it happened to a different person. It is just—there is something about it you can no longer touch. But you remember him. You can see his face.

“Steve,” you say, and he turns to look at you.

“Steve,” you say again, and the words are thick in your mouth. This, you think suddenly, almost nonsensically, must be what it is like for regular people. “It’s because—it’s because—I killed Howard.”

He stares at you for a long moment, not reacting at all.

“He figured it out,” you say. “He told me.”

“How can he—I read your file,” he says, automatonic. “That wasn’t in there. I would know—I would—”

“He figured it out,” you say. “Somebody—messed with their car.”

“I read your file,” he repeats. “I—”

“How much was in there?” you ask, and he doesn’t say anything. Seventy years. Seventy years is a long time.

“That can’t—that can’t be right,” he says. “I don’t—”

It’s possible, of course, that you didn’t. That he was wrong. Nobody, probably, will ever really know. But you believe it. They sent you to kill Steve. Why wouldn’t they send you to kill his old friend? They probably made sure that he saw your face.

You can believe it because it does not really hurt you. It is just another terrible thing. It is not as bad as the children—the children whose faces you hope you never remember. But that is not how it is, for Steve. It hurts.

He has leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees, covered his face with his hands.

“Steve,” you say. “I’m sorry.”

He doesn’t move for a long time. Well. His shoulders are shaking. Finally he sits back, wiping his face off. “It’s not your fault,” he says thickly, as you knew he would.

“I’m sorry,” you say again, and he turns his face away from you, into the darkness of the night.

 

*

 

The thing you were not expecting, you think, as you watch him sleep, is this: that he would be weaker than you. This is the critical thing, the thing you would never have predicted, which has changed everything. You are not exactly sure what you were expecting, or why—maybe it was the way Tony Stark talked about him, about Steve, about Captain America; or maybe it was the terrified burning feeling inside of you when you thought of him, how you could only bear to think around him most of the time, look at the strange almost-memory of him from the side. Or maybe it was some kind of deep-buried knowledge—real knowledge, something beyond logic or explanation. Just a knowingness. A knowing of Steve. Because you do know Steve. You know this now. You do not remember the things that he remembers but you know him. And you were expecting him to be stronger than you are. And he is not.

He is not weak. He is just—there are small cracks running through him, threatening to break apart. He is like someone who has been awake for a long, long time, without being allowed to sleep, and just keeps staggering forward, because he must—but there are things people need to survive. All sorts of things: and sleep is just one of them.

You were not expecting to be stronger. Steve was the solid one to you, then. But the world has shifted on its axis since you were in that room looking at the shadow of that tree. Now you are in the woods. And Steve is here.

You crouch next to him, where he is lying in his blankets the ground—on the dirt, and the pine needles—and touch the backs of your fingers to his hand, as gently as you can. The skin there is warm. He shifts, blinks, and you pull your hand back, but his hand is twitching toward yours, automatic.

“Is something wrong?” he asks, a little fuzzy.

You shake your head. He just looks up at you, the liquid of his eyes gleaming in the moonlight, without saying anything. You should move, probably, but you can’t, with him looking at you: you are stronger than he is, but not in all ways.

He looks down at your hands, hanging between your knees, and reaches one of his out—and touches the underside of your wrist. Where the blood is flowing. Snick and you’re gone.

He doesn’t move his fingers for a long time, but somehow your hands have moved so that they are touching more, almost curled together. It is too much: too much heat, too much sensation. It hurts. The way cold burns. Finally he lowers his arm, slides his hand away slowly, until he lets it fall back on his stomach.

“Go to sleep,” he says, and when you lie down he turns to watch you, and keeps watching you, as far as you can tell, until you do.

 

*

 

You wake up before Steve, in the morning. “Don’t get killed,” you tell him, while he’s still blinking blearily, pillow creases in his face, hair a disaster. “Steve? _Don’t get killed_. I’m—”

“Where are you going?” he interrupts.

“I’m getting water and using the bathroom,” you say. “Over there. Make noise if somebody tries to kill you.”

He looks at you balefully.

“Do you need me to wait?” you ask, not un-seriously. You aren’t going to get Steve killed because you were impatient.

“No,” he mutters, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. “I’m fine. Go do—whatever.”

You use the toilet as fast as you can, and then find yourself behind an old man in line to refill your water bottles. He is taking his time. But you can see Steve, although he is far away, and he looks fine. You are both fine, for now. That doesn’t mean you aren’t impatient.

“Why are you wearing a glove?” someone asks, and you turn and look down at the little girl standing behind you. America is full, you have found, of little girls.

You open your mouth, and close it. “I hurt my hand,” you say finally. “I need to wear it now.”

“Oh,” she says, and looks sympathetic. She has an enormous mass of curly hair. “I’m sorry.” She’s holding a big empty water jug. “My brother broke his wrist before we went on vacation but that’s not really the same.”

“No,” you say.

“It’s making him annoying, though,” she says. “Vacations are supposed to be relaxing. That’s what my mom always says.”

You look at her. “Are they ever?” you ask. She can’t be more than ten. She probably isn’t ten yet.

“No,” she says, once she has thought about it, as though she is having some kind of revelation.

You finally get a turn at the water station, and fill up each of your big bottles. You turn the knob for her, too, so she can hold the jug in both arms. It’s practically the size of her whole torso.

“Thanks,” she says.

“You’re welcome,” you say, and watch as she staggers off, listing from side to side, off to her brother and her mother and god knows who else, what else—everything. It makes something inside of you hurt, all of the sudden. You have a pain deep in your gut, that doesn’t go away even when you walk all the way back to Steve, who has his blanket pulled up around his shoulders, and hand him his bottle of water.

“Thanks,” he says, and you don’t say anything in response. Now that he is properly awake he looks dully miserable—like he is trying to hide it. He’s not good at it. You sit down next to him, crossing your legs, and wait for him to talk.

But it becomes clear, after a while, that he isn’t going to. He just continues looking persistently miserable. You look at his face, still a little blurry from sleep, in the early morning light, and whatever it is inside of you hurts even more acutely. There are so many children in America and Steve is one of them—the strangest, loneliest child; the only one without an age.

You aren’t sure what that makes you. You think, suddenly, of babies. You haven’t seen a baby—not a single one. But you can imagine them. You can imagine them so clearly: imagine exactly what one might feel like, in your arms. And you wonder now if you killed babies, or if that was the one thing you managed in the end to avoid. You do not know. You never will, probably.

You think of babies: you think of the cracking-open of the milk-white world. You think of those high-pitched wailing shrieks. And you think that maybe the two of you are the last two living children of some other time—some unrecoverable place to which neither of you can return. And you will never go back there. And you will never grow up. And maybe if you die you will not die at all but simply open your eyes again, unremembering, unthinking. Maybe that is what has happened to you, over and over again, for all these years.

“We’re fucked,” you tell him, and he winces.

“I know,” he says. “I know.”

“I’m sorry,” you say.

“Jesus, Bucky, it’s not—it’s not your fault,” he says.

“I know,” you say. “I’m sorry anyway.”

“You keep apologizing to me,” he says, wiping at his eyes. “I should be apologizing to you.”

“What for?” you ask.

“Fuck,” he chokes out, covering his face with his hands, pressing the heels of his palms against his eyes. “Fuck—everything, everything, I didn’t—I fucked it all up, I fucked it—I, I left you there, I didn’t check, I didn’t—you wouldn’t have—none of this would have happened, and then I—I should have tried harder, I should have tried to—I should have found you before he did, before—none of this should have happened, none of it, I—I—”

“Steve,” you say. “Steve.”

“Stop it,” he chokes. “I don’t—I don’t—”

And it is terrible, the helplessness—for you cannot fix it, the sadness inside of him. You think it will always be there. You think maybe it always was, even before all of this happened. You don’t know why, exactly—you just have a feeling. So you push yourself closer and put your arm around him—your left arm, it is the only one in the right spot—and pull him toward you.

“Stop it,” he says again, “stop it—” but you don’t. You don’t. You curl your body against his, awkward, clumsy, but it doesn’t matter: your bodies are bodies together, and they are there, and they are real. And finally he puts one arm around your waist and buries his face in your neck and cries, and you tuck your chin over his shoulder—and you do, too. You haven’t. This is the first time. It feels good.

 

*

 

You crack open the windows of the car, letting the warm air whip through your hair while Steve taps his fingers along to the music. It’s overcast today: no shadows anywhere.

“Where do you want to go?” he asks, and you look over at him.

“I don’t know,” you say. “You’re the one driving.”

He huffs. “You never would have stood for that, back in the day,” he says. “You would be _ashamed_.”

“Oh yeah?” you say.

“You were always dragging me to all sorts of places I didn’t want to go to,” he says. “So I’d have to raise stringent objections and then I’d always go anyway, and just wind up getting into pointless arguments with people, about nothing.”

“Why?” you ask.

“Why’d I get into arguments?” he says. “You used to say I had a complex—”

“No,” you say. “Why’d you go.”

He blinks, and glances over at you. “Well, you were going,” he says, very simply, like that explains everything.

“We could go to a national park,” he says a moment later, and snorts with laughter.

“Have you been to all of them?” you ask, and he shakes his head.

“Hardly any,” he says, and makes a face. “Too busy—killing people.”

“Seems wrong,” you say, and he grins.

“It does,” he agrees, and then he laughs a little, humorlessly. “Wish we could have gone to the Grand Canyon. Too far away, now.”

“Why?” you ask, and he laughs again, a weird barking sound.

“You always wanted to go,” he says, clenching one hand tight around the wheel. “I don’t know—I don’t know why. You just always did. But that’s not how it was back then. We used to—we used to say that’s what we’d do, if we got back.” He looks away for a moment, and then back at the road. “But we didn’t. Neither of us.”

“Have you gone?” you ask.

“No,” he says.

“Maybe next time,” you say, and he laughs again, to pretend he isn’t crying. He’s not really, anyway—not much. Just a little.

“Yeah,” he says, hoarse. “Yeah. Maybe next time.”

 

*

 

You build a fire at your campsite that night, because it is allowed, and everybody else is doing it, where they have set up their tents and sleeping bags as spread-out as possible from each other. Steve sits in front of it, feeding it sticks, flicking in pine needles, while you finish your sandwich.

“What did you do, to Stark?” he asks. “To Tony.”

“I almost killed him,” you say. “I—” You gesture at your face. “I broke his face. I would have killed him if your friend hadn’t stopped me. Natasha,” you add, when he blinks, uncomprehending.

“Oh,” he says, “right,” and then looks back down at the fire.

“You’ll be all right,” you tell him after a while. “Captain America. Nothing’s going to happen to you.”

His face twists, agonized, and he looks down. “I don’t—” he starts, and then snaps a stick too hard and tosses it into the fire, where it sparks and crackles.

“It’s—I’m so fucking—tired of it,” he says finally, and he looks it: he looks tired. “But I can’t—I can’t stop. Do you—there’s nowhere my life goes except—on like this, until something happens, and it’s over. Because they ask me to do things, and then I—I can’t _not_ do them, and they know. They know. So—that’s it. They just keep—over and over and over again.” He rubs his hand over his face. “It’s not enough,” he says brokenly. “It’s not how it’s supposed to be.”

“What?” you ask.

“Your life,” he says.

“Tell me something,” you say a long time later, when the fire has burned down almost all the way, and he’s had to build it back up again.

“What do you want to know?” he asks.

“No,” you say, “I mean—tell me something.”

He glances up at you, face lit from below, and you remember—it feels like a long time ago, somehow, and also not at all—seeing him for the first time: turning around, and him being there. How everything in your body stopped.

He’s gone still, twig dangling from his fingers. “Well,” he says hoarsely, “you used to make me—tell you stories. Whenever you were bored. Or sick.” He looks down. “I wasn’t very good at it.”

Your heart is thudding hard in your chest.

“I just said rude things about you mostly,” he says, lips twitching weakly. “When you asked. I think that’s why you did it. Except when you were—really sick. That happened a couple times. Nobody ever talks about that anymore. Obviously.”

“So?” you say when he doesn’t say anything else for a long while.

“I don’t know,” he says with a choked laugh. “All of the sudden I can’t think of anything.”

 

*

 

That night, after you put out the fire, you lie down in your blankets (sleeping bags, you decided quickly, were unsuitable, for obvious reasons) and look up at the cloudy sky. You can hear crickets thrumming peacefully, all around. A dark shadow of a bird leaps out from a tree and vanishes before you can see where it’s going.

There is a tree inside of you with bare branches and the shadows of leaves, growing. There is something inside of you that is moving. There is a heart beating. There is Steve.

You roll over, almost into him, and he looks up at you hesitantly before moving himself so that your warm bodies are curled up against each other’s under the blankets. His breath moves slowly against your skin, and you tighten your hand in his shirt. Your knees are knocking together. You think: _I’m sorry_ , and everything else for which there are no words, and there like infants, like dogs, like lovers, you fall asleep.

 

*

 

You are buying chips and water and a coffee for Steve in a service station while he fills up the gas tank the next day when you hear it. The sound. Ka-thunk ka-thunk ka-thunk.

You step outside—it is grey again today, grim—and look up. There’s a helicopter coming, not too far off, now. And two cars approaching on the road. You toss the chips and the drinks on the ground.

Steve has gone still over the gas pump. You look over at him, across what now seems like an endless stretch of pavement: at the curve of his skull, his wide shoulders, his hair blowing in the wind. He turns to you and says something that you can’t hear over the sound of the chopper. You just reach down and flip out your knives: one in each hand. They feel good. And then you look at him again, at the despair in his beautiful much-loved face, and you do something you have not ever done, but suddenly can, with every part of yourself, remember doing: you smile at him.

 

*

 

Maybe if you die you will not die at all. Maybe you will just open your eyes in some other place, in some other time; maybe you will wake up in a white room with a window and a tree outside and you will not remember anything. And maybe Steve will come for you, or you will go find Steve, or maybe you will wander without each other, lost in the dark—or maybe you will die together. Maybe when you die nothing will happen to you at all. Maybe you are no longer made for death. Maybe that too is unrecoverable.

And maybe if you die you will die and your mind will be wiped blank and your body will collapse and then decay. And maybe you will be put in the earth. And maybe the part of you that somebody else grafted onto you without your permission will last longer than the rest of you, last until nobody remembers what it might have been, anymore; whom it might have belonged to. Maybe except for that strange uncomfortable part you are just human after all. Maybe that will be the most surprising thing.

And maybe if you die you will open your eyes and you will remember everything: every single thing you have lived through. Every single thing you have done. Maybe you will be able to turn to Steve and say, _Remember when_? And maybe you will be able to tell him stories he himself has forgotten. But you hope not.

You hope that when you die they put you in the ground with coins on your eyes and under your tongue and that you stay dead. Even if it is Steve who comes seeking you in the dark. Even if it is Steve who comes singing. When you die, you hope you stay dead.

But you really hope that you don’t die.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story would not have existed if it were not for [this fic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1680635) by [kvikindi](http://archiveofourown.org/users/kvikindi/pseuds/kvikindi). [This one](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2414678) by [nimmieamee](http://archiveofourown.org/users/nimmieamee/pseuds/nimmieamee) helped get me over the finish line. I thought a lot about _The Stranger_. The light from the tree outside the window I think I stole from Virginia Woolf somewhere. You may notice a passing resemblance (ahem) between the end of this story and the end of _In Bruges_ , which was not deliberate, but I have seen that movie so many times I have lost track, so I doubt it was entirely coincidental.
> 
> As this fic progressed, I listened a whole lot to [this song, and then ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSPfeTwl8Kw)[this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMVCkgznTOY), and finally [this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWQocqOABYw).
> 
> I apologize for everything, I am not writing a sequel, and thanks so much for reading, as always. If you want to ask me questions I am on tumblr [here](http://morgan-leigh.tumblr.com).


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